February 07, 2001, 1:40 PM — E-MARKETPLACES and supply-chain automation undoubtedly have captured the attention of businesses the world over. But before companies can successfully engage in collaborative e-commerce, they first must tackle the challenge of automating their own internal workflow processes.
In order to compete in supply-chain partnerships and the many-to-many model of collaborative marketplace exchanges, companies need a fluid process. Integral to that is an in-house transactional model that connects data across the organization, eliminates information bottlenecks, and ensures interoperability among business units.
Moving toward an automated workflow requires merging the sundry in-house systems, such as order tracking, shipping, inventory, accounting, and billing. Most of these systems were never intended to operate in concert, let alone at Internet speed, or off a common set of data. And they certainly weren't designed to exchange data seamlessly.
Connecting multiple databases and systems to pull off this feat is a complex task that typically takes longer and costs more than initially anticipated. But the benefits of automating your internal e-business processes include cost savings from streamlined operations, faster reaction to volatile market demands, and improved customer satisfaction. And with the proper framework in place, your company can confidently move forward with a collaborative commerce initiative.
Abundant planning
Forged partnerships, whether private or marketplace-born, will become increasingly important to maintaining a competitive advantage. The long-range ROI of reorganizing workflow will be greater if your solution also ensures future flexibility for building and leveraging partnerships with other organizations.
Integration planning and methodology will be driven by not only existing in-house requirements but future ones as well. Depending on the antiquity of your orgganization's current workflow and its underlying infrastructure, hooking in to a partner's applications may most easily be accomplished with a full gut-and-clean re-engineering of your own core processes. Unfortunately, this will carry the steepest set of new IT requirements and costly staffing and training demands.
For companies heavily invested in disparate IT architectures, the best strategy might deploy a flexible solution, such as WebMethods Enterprise, that would meet short-term in-house automation goals while preserving the ability to reach long-term business-to-business and marketplace integration objectives in the future. The benefits realized will help blend short-term competitiveness with long-term ROI.
With so much at stake, not the least of which are sizeable cost considerations and an implementation trail fraught with potential pitfalls, enlisting an outside consultant to help evaluate your company's specific needs would be prudent.
Building interfaces
Some companies that already have invested in robust, traditional transactional systems, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions, may be able to get by with an interface adapter from their vendor to begin integrating with new partners.
For organizations starting from scratch, building an in-house process workflow to connect their systems entails constructing applications for real-time messaging to bridge communications among disparate business units. Message brokers, such as the IBM MQSeries family, and XML-based data transformation tools, such as Data Junction, can help surmount many inconsistencies that hinder integration efforts, particularly for unlocking legacy data resources.
