ICT and e-Business Impact in the Retail Industry - empirica

e-Business in the Retail Sector2004: Mercator expands electronic document exchange to 100 suppliers. Electronicdata exchange with the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia is alsointroduced in 2004. The company’s ERP system automatically compiles reportsabout the company’s commerce with other companies within the EU from archivedelectronic business documents. These reports are automatically sent overATbizNET/Panteon.net to the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia.2005: Mercator expands electronic document exchange to 125 suppliers.2006: Despatch advice is introduced in B2C e-commerce between Mercator andPetrol. Mercator expands electronic exchange of documents to 150 suppliers.2007: Mercator expands electronic exchange of documents to more than 200suppliers.The solutions described have mainly been adopted by suppliers of fast moving consumergoods and cosmetics. The number of suppliers involved in e-commerce is steadily risingfrom year to year, as can be seen from the chronology. At first large suppliers joined e-commerce with Mercator followed by smaller ones. Mercator has not put any deadlines ordemands to the suppliers that they have to use electronic commerce, if they want to stayin business. However, it has started to charge suppliers that were invited to join, but stilldo not conduct e-commerce, the cost for processing paper documents.Technology usedThis section briefly describes different technological solutions that have been developedfor e-commerce between Mercator and its suppliers. First the EANCOM standards usedfor electronic business documents are presented, and then software and hardwaresolutions (FULL_EDI, e-Service, WEB-EDI), including the network(ATbizNET/Panteon.net) over which e-business documents are exchanged.EANCOM Slovenia subset standardMessage definitions of order, order confirmation and inventory reports that are used inMercator’s e-commerce are based on GS1 EANCOM standards. The latter have beenchosen, because they are used by almost every large company in Europe. However, theyare very complicated, since they have been developed to cover the needs of everybranch in every detail. Therefore those EANCOM message definitions were simplifiedaccording to Mercator’s needs. In 2003, GS1 Slovenia formally granted the simplifiedversion of GS1 EANCOM standards developed for Mercator’s e-commerce the status ofEANCOM Slovenian subset standard.Full EDI solutionThe FULL-EDI solution is based on two applications:TIE EP, which translates e-business documents (orders and inventory reports) fromin-house standards used by Mercator’s ERP system into corresponding GS1EANCOM standards andeb-MANAGER, which performs different supplementary functions to the basicfunctionalities of TIE EP such as providing overviews of messages received andstatus overviews.Every order and inventory report produced by Mercator’s ERP system is automaticallytranslated into the corresponding GS1 EANCOM standard by TIE EP. The document isthen archived in a database on Mercator’s server “Rip_novi” by eb-MANAGER. In124