Mark Morley, director of industry and product marketing at e-commerce solution provider GXS, leads the company's B2B e-commerce product strategy in the automotive and industrial sectors. Prior to joining GXS, he worked for the National B2B Centre in the UK, and with product lifecycle management solution provider PTC. He also maintains a blog at blogs.gxs.com/morleym.
What biggest obstacle to deploying technology in the automotive aftermarket?
The number one obstacle to deploying technology in the automotive aftermarket is the complexity and multi-level nature of the automotive aftermarket supply chain. The many players involved, including car dealers, retail networks, distributors, third-party logistics providers and customs/border control agencies makes trying to provide a global, real time view of parts shipments next to impossible. Tracking parts in real time from their source of manufacture to their point of sale is a crucial problem that many OEMs and their suppliers are trying to address.
To achieve a level of real-time visibility of parts shipments, all participants in the automotive aftermarket supply chain must ideally have access to a Web-based, global visibility solution that is easy to use and can be quickly deployed. Having improved levels of visibility enables dealers or retailers to better manage their inventory levels and achieve greater customer satisfaction, as a result of greater visibility of when parts are likely to arrive at dealers and store locations.
How has the economy impacted the way companies approach e-commerce deployments, i.e., using a managed service versus in-house solution?
In the current economic downturn, many companies are re-evaluating their e-commerce related purchasing strategies. Companies are starting to look at alternatives to purchasing software-based solutions and instead are looking toward service-based e-commerce offerings. Software-based e-commerce solutions are traditionally expensive to buy and they require ongoing maintenance fees as well as regular software updates. Service-based solutions require a lower up front investment and upgrades are provided automatically on an ongoing basis.
Software-based e-commerce environments place a heavy reliance on having highly skilled IT resources in place to manage the environment effectively. With an outsourced e-commerce environment, these valuable IT resources can be redeployed on to other IT projects leaving the e-commerce environment and the associated trading partner community to be managed by an e-commerce outsourcing vendor such as GXS. Outsourcing the management of an e-commerce environment is regarded as a key method to reduce operational costs in a business. More importantly it allows companies to re-focus on core competencies.
What sort of e-commerce services/functionality have your customers in the automotive space been most interested in during the past few years? Is there new functionality that you think would be of particular interest to this market?
Over the past few years, we have seen an increasing trend from automotive companies to integrate their ERP and B2B platforms together to form one seamless business environment. The global nature of the automotive industry has meant that companies are seeking ways to integrate geographically dispersed manufacturing plants and trading partner communities. ERP systems contain valuable information, which if unlocked and made available across an extended enterprise can provide significant business benefits and operational efficiencies. SAP is the most widely used ERP platform in the automotive industry. Extracting information from an SAP IDOC document, for example, and reusing this information within a range of electronic B2B e-commerce documents offers significant benefits for a company.
Similarly, many smaller automotive companies use Microsoft Excel as the basis for their B2B documents. GXS recently launched Trading Grid for Excel, which enables even the smallest trading partner to send B2B documents via a simple pull-down menu within Excel. Small suppliers can simply open up an Excel based electronic document such as an invoice and fill in the relevant details. From the pull-down menu in Excel they are then able to send the invoice to GXS Trading Grid, where it is converted to an EDI message and then forwarded on to the trading partner. Given that Excel is one of the most popular applications among Chinese-based suppliers, it allows global companies to connect to these small suppliers with minimal effort.
Providing integration services to SAP and Microsoft Excel has helped many companies around the world to streamline their B2B processes and ensure that they are able to trade electronically with their entire trading partner community.
