The vast majority of enterprises use a multi-channel approach to delivery of 'documents' that a business commonly shares/exchanges with trading partners within its Supply Chain - Purchase Orders, Invoices, Statements, Delivery Notes, Goods Received Notes, Proof of Delivery, Inventory Information, Requests for Quotes, Payments, Remittance Advices, etc. etc.
'Outgoing' documents will, typically, be produced in or via the Enterprises ERP or MRP systems and vice versa for the information contained in 'incoming' documents.
The following (highly simplified) schematic illustrates the typical routes - from source to destination - taken by different documents being delivered to members of the Enterprises' Supply Chain:
It is common for large organisations to use a mixture of electronic and traditional (fax and post) methods to deliver documents to the Supply Chain. Preferred Suppliers will often be integrated with the Enterprise for example through, either, an EDI system or intermediate e-Trading platform (like beX).
These types of electronic document exchange will often account for up to 80% (by value) of the Enterprises' purchasing documents. That leaves a significant balance - possibly 80% by VOLUME - of document exchanges that occur in "the old fashioned manual way". To support these alternative delivery mechanisms will normally involve a mixture of in-house and outsourced resources; fragmenting overall control of delivery due to the diversity of resources employed.
Enterprises with this type of Supply Chain document exchange arrangement often enjoy the worst of both worlds. The small efficiencies gained from 'automating' exchanges with their preferred suppliers (the minority by volume) is outweighed by the continuing inefficiencies perpetuated in support of the majority (by volume) of their supply chain members.
Organisations that have just embarked on an 'e-Trading' initiative with their Supply Chain are probably in the worst of all situations. In addition to the incumbent processes (and costs) of continuing to service their Supply Chain requirements in the 'traditional' manner, they have the added cost of mounting a complex transition from 'old' to 'new' delivery technologies.
The majority of businesses completely underestimate the effort that will be needed to make that transition. The technical challenges (agreeing a suitable communications link with their chosen e-Trading 'hub', agreeing suitable data formats for exchange, business rules, new processes, etc.) are as nothing compared to the general lack of readiness at both a cultural level and informational level - i.e. not being able to collate all the necessary (and, often, fundamental) information about their suppliers to enable a roll-out.
Despite providing a range of tools to assist in the roll-out of the new e-Trading initiative, most organisations are unable to use these tools to any real advantage because they lack the basic data that these tools need: centralised, organised, and validated information about the suppliers to be targeted.
The problem therefore can be summarised as follows:
And the key paradoxes are:
Rather than attempt to answer the last two questions, our approach is to accept that the first question is true, and use that to address the second question.
There's no real good reason why the organisation has to support both traditional and electronic document delivery channels beyond the simple fact that the Enterprise's new e-Trading Project cannot interfere with business as usual.
And there's no barrier at the e-Trading hub that suggests they - the hub operators - can't assist the Enterprise to achieve a more-or-less uniform method(from the Enterprise's perspective) of delivering documents to their suppliers.
The Burns Business Exchange comprises a sophisticated, multi-channel, document delivery service that allows buyers to deliver ANY document type.
The Business Exchange Outgoing Document Delivery Service provides:
The Incoming Document Delivery Service provides: