One Goal - Two Complementary Approaches

As a manager or executive in your company's purchasing or materials management organization, you face many challenges. Overall, you are being asked to find ways to cut costs, shorten cycle times, improve supply chain partner relationships and generally do more with less.

B2B Connex offers two approaches to improving supply chain collaboration that can be used independently or together, depending on the specific client scenario.

B2B Connex Portal

B2B Connex Portal is a Web-based portal providing both Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functions to allow supply chain partners to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Business documents are posted to and retrieved from your B2B Connex Portal. Documents can flow in both directions, and all document changes are tracked electronically. Email is used to alert partners when new or changed documents have been posted to the portal, where partners can view, accept, or request changes to those documents electronically.

B2B Connex Portal is an easy to implement and easy to use solution that can help even small companies make dramatic improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of their communications with supply chain partners.

B2B Connex Direct

B2B Connex Direct allows supply chain partners to exchange selected business documents bi-directionally directly between their ERP systems for complete sourcing automation, without the need to post to or retrieve from a Web-based portal. For example, a purchaser could create a purchase order in his SAP R3 system that would be translated by B2B Connex Direct into a file format that could be accepted directly into the order entry system of the supplier's JD Edwards ERP system. B2B Connex Direct automatically translates the purchase order between the formats that are understood by both SAP and JD Edwards, and ensures the secure and successful delivery of the document between systems.

This exchange can go back and forth as supplier and customer request and accept changes. All new and amended documents can be configured to either pass directly between ERP systems, or be held in an electronic "pending" file for manual review and approval before posting to the ERP system.

B2B Connex Direct eliminates the need for document posting and retrieval through a Web portal. Because the setup is more technically complex, B2B Connex Direct is generally more suited to medium and large sized organizations where the return on investment (ROI) can be exceptional.

Whether you select B2B Connex Portal, B2B Connex Direct, or some combination of the two, you will see immediate and sustained improvements in your ability to communicate and collaborate with your supply chain partners, suppliers, distributors and even sister plants.

Improved Manufacturer's Processes

Partners

As a manufacturer, you need a solution that works for Your Business and delivers benefits including:

To work with Your Business, a solution has to fit your ERP investment, your supply chain processes, and communication modes for your suppliers, distributors, and sister plants. The solution should take weeks to get up and running, not months. It should be flexible enough to improve the process but keep it simple, and it should be easy to use for your suppliers, distributors, sister plants, and internal users.

Suppliers

B2B Connex improves the process to:

Distributors

Using B2B Connex, manufacturers can:

Sister Plants

Your sister plants can be customers, suppliers or both. Regardless of your particular organization's structure, your internal processes with sister plants operate as effectively or ineffectively as your processes with external suppliers. Using B2B Connex to improve internal processes, manufacturers can: