Retrieved from Allafrica News
 http://allafrica.com/stories/200203130156.html

Business Day (Johannesburg)
March 13, 2002 
Posted to the web March 13, 2002 


ELECTRONIC communication and e-commerce have become keys to successful business in today's highly competitive international market.

Shane Russell, director of Collaborative Xchange (CX), says the company provides a hosting service to clients so they can communicate effectively with other organisations in an integrated manner. "It allows organisations to share the information they require for planning purposes or for smoothing out and automating transactions or interactions between trading parties. Traditionally, these processes have required high levels of manual intervention between disparate electronic systems, leading to errors, inefficiencies and increased costs throughout the supply chain. "Effectively, we offer a data messaging and supply chain process management hub," Russell says.

He says customers approach CX with a list of their suppliers and customers every organisation in their supply chain and the type of information flow that they wish to automate or the business processes they want to improve. CX provides a messaging switch that allows it to take data from one organisation, in the format generated by that company's system, and translate it into the formats used by all the organisations to whom the messages are being sent. "Our infrastructure is designed to provide message switching in a logistics environment, where real-time switching is required as opposed to batch processing. It allows people to make decisions quicker and respond to events as they occur," Russell says.

Through this service CX is able to provide what it terms a supply chain visibility layer. In other words, when information is sent from one party to another, components of that information are stored on CX's database.

An organisation is therefore able to monitor suppliers in terms of their delivery performance. In addition, the database enables CX or the trading party to set event triggers for its customers. If an event has not taken place by a predetermined date or time, such as if an order has not been shipped, the system will alert the affected organisation.