Supplying the Flip side – The Case for a Supplier Portal
eCommerce… the opportunity to promote and sell your products online to customers; enabling them to check their order and shipping status, review their account details, and more. The potential benefits are easy to identify: better customer service, reduced administrative tasks (when properly integrated), quicker to market with new/updated products and, most of all, increased market share through the additional Web sales channel, 24*7 availability and cross selling.
But what about the flip side of the order processing chain?
Many companies still have mostly manual procedures for supplier communication and procurement. For instance purchase orders are manually generated and mailed, invoice inquiries are handled by phone, and supplier product catalogues are received and stored in inconsistent formats that don't allow for any automated procedures.
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The Information Explosion (and the case for Business Process Integration)
"These vast size of data being generated, archived, managed and exchanged is driving the need for business process improvement and business process integration."
Rollin Ford, Wal-Mart’s CIO, earlier this year stated “Every day I wake up and ask….how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyze data better”. Not surprising when you consider that Wal-Mart processes over 1 million client business transactions every hour and manages databases over 170 times the size of the entire Library of Congress (the largest library in the world). However, Wal-Mart is not an isolated phenomenon. We are in an era that has been referred to as the “Industrial Revolution of Data”. The Economist calls it the “Data Deluge” and describes data as “the new raw material of business, on a par with capital and labor”.
In 2005 we created 150 billion gigabytes (or 150 exabytes) of data globally and this year (2010) a whopping 1,200 billion gigabytes (or 1,200 exabytes) of information is projected to be generated. Digital data is increasing at a compounded growth rate of 60% per year and this growth rate is expected to increase dramatically going forward. Google now manages 35,000 queries each second and processes more data in half a day than the US Postal Service is expected to manage and deliver all year (about 5 petabytes worth, or 5 million gigabytes). Corporate America is expected to archive 27 billion gigabytes (or 27 exabytes) of data this year alone.
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