GXS sponsored a study which looked at how today's suppliers were dealing with ever complex supply chain related requests from their customers. The study, entitled Enhancing Customer Centric Supply Chains, was conducted by SCM World and Cranfield University. This second of a two part presentation discusses how GXS Managed Services can help to address some of the complex challenges facing suppliers working across today's customer centric supply chains. Please try and review part 1 of this presentation which discusses some of the key results from the study. Updated April 2013
In the first part of this video presentation I discussed the findings from a recent study that was sponsored by GXS. The study was produced by SCM World and was led by Professor Martin Christopher, Emeritus Professor of Marketing and Logistics at Cranfield School of Management in the UK.The study looked at some of the issues facing today’s suppliers and how they were having to address ever more demanding and complex requests from their customers.The second part of this video presentation discusses how GXS Managed Services can help alleviate and reduce complexities across many of today’s customer centric supply chains.
This diagram shows the core components of our Managed Services platform - From an infrastructure perspective, GXS operates two primary global data centers one in Ohio North America and the other in Amstelveen in Holland, redundancy is provided within and across both data centers. The infrastructure offers a High Performance Network-based Translation Engine and is able to offer extensive mediation between any communication protocol The infrastructure provides a high 99.95% availability with 12-hour disaster recovery, we undertake full weekly and daily incremental backups, Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) with battery and diesel turbine backups. The whole infrastructure operates on best in class hardware from the leading networking and storage server manufacturers GXS operates a mapping center of excellence, we undertake the design & development of maps and offer any-to-any data format conversion. Once the maps have been created we offer ongoing change management as well We can offer transaction level visibility and we can implement score-carding and reporting so that you can keep track of the performance of your suppliers. We can also provide visibility into your order life cycle and logistics networkProgram management ensures that your B2B environment is implemented correctly. A designated program manager will help define the scope of the project, the requirements and ensure that the project is completed on time. The other role of the program manager is to ensure that change requests or modifications to the B2B infrastructure are implemented correctly. When integrating with an ERP system, the program manager will ensure that any change requests are carried across both the ERP and B2B systems to ensure that they remain synchronised GXS Expert On-Boarding provides an on-boarding service for trading partners. This will include contacting each trading partner to understand their current B2B connectivity and EDI capabilities and it will include ongoing communication and training in the use of any new B2B solutions that are to be implemented across a trading partner community From a systems management perspective we can offer full system monitoring, security and proactive monitoring to provide alerts of any potential problems. We also provide full data recovery services and a 2 year data archiving service Finally we offer multi-lingual 24/7 helpdesk support. This service offers proactive event monitoring so that if problems arise they can be identified and resolved as quickly as possible
Now there are a number of challenges associated with exchanging data between suppliers and their customers.In the ideal world suppliers would like to just send simple flat files to their customers but it is not as easy as that,For example exchanging large files can dramatically reduce the speed of a network infrastructure, there are many different formats of data that can be exchanged either via machine to machine or entered via a portal environment. There are many different comms protocols, and the data itself may contain errors that have to reworked before it can be used by a customer
Suppliers have to utilise numerous document standards when working with their customers. The problem is complicated still further when suppliers are asked to support their customers in different regions around the world.Many companies use a range of legacy and modern XML based standards and each region in the world may have a slightly different flavour of these document standards.One thing is for sure, today’s suppliers face an uphill battle when trying to engage with customers who use a multitude of different messaging standards.
As shown earlier, many suppliers simply do not have the resources to manage a complex B2B environment, let alone maintain numerous document maps or integrate to back office systems such as SAP or Oracle.One of the growing trends in the IT sector over the past couple of years has been the introduction of cloud based services and this is certainly an area that will change the way in which suppliers engage with their customers. Moving application hosting, platform management and application integration to a hosted or Cloud based environment will help to simplify B2B processes and help the industry to consolidate industry standards. From a business perspective cloud based environments will also help to significantly improve competitiveness in the market and most importantly of all reduce costs and improve ROI.
To find out further information about how GXS can help Enhance Customer Centric supply chains, please visit the dedicated microsites that are highlighted on this slide.GXS Insights contains a number of valuable resources including thought leadership articles, white papers and presentations. These will help you get a better understanding of some of the issues facing today’s customer centric supply chains and offers advice on how GXS Managed Services can help alleviate these issues.