June 14,
2006
Distributors
Provide Cutting Edge E-Procurement
The
term e-procurement rings of the dot com era. That’s appropriate, since e-procurement
systems were developed during the heady days of early Internet business.
E-procurement systems were one of the success stories of the late 1990s and
they are still around in very sophisticated forms. Most large distributors are
set up to deliver their components in a manner that fits automated
e-procurement systems, and even those customers who don’t have a sophisticated
e-procurement system can take advantage of the automation distributors provide
on their web sites that can be used to select, purchase and pay for parts.
Chicago-based
small supply and MRO distributor Newark InOne first developed its automated
tools in 1998. “We had about five major customers who talked about
e-procurement back then,” says Dianne Kibbey, Newark InOne’s director of
ecommerce business development. Kibbey was hired to build the company’s
e-procurement initiative. Since those early days, Kibbey has been involved in
setting up 250 customers. “We have a whole business unit to work with
e-business customers and we have a full range of implementation services,” says
Kibbey.
Kibbey
notes that Newark InOne can accommodate virtually any e-procurement system on
the market, so customers can take Newark InOne’s data and integrate it into
their own internal systems. This allows customers to automatically absorb
purchase transactions, shipment acknowledgements, and invoicing data directly
into their business systems, thus eliminating time-consuming, costly and
potentially inaccurate human support.
Newark
InOne’s e-procurement services allow customers to select preferred suppliers
and individual often-ordered parts to create a custom catalog that is branded
specifically for the customer. The customer catalog also includes the
negotiated pricing and terms. Orders can be accepted and exchanged with
customers through EDI or XML. The company also provides a hotline specifically
for e-procurement support.
For
many companies, the switch to e-procurement requires a major change in the way
buyers purchase their components. Likewise, the shift to e-procurement also
alters how suppliers interact with the distributor and its customers. To
support this change, Kibbey’s team helps customers and suppliers through the
transition. “We provide user adoption and supplier enablement,” says Kibbey. “We’re
changing the way they do business, so we help orient them to the new way of
doing business.”
Recently,
Newark InOne added an online RoHS catalog to match the company’s paper RoHS
catalog. With the RoHS deadline just days away, this addition is designed to
help companies identify and select compliant parts. “Our RoHS parts are flagged
as RoHS compliant, and customers can filter for RoHS compliance,” explains
Kibbey. “RoHS information can become part of a customer’s custom experience.”
The
broad-line distributor, Avnet Inc. in Phoenix, also provides substantial
e-procurement services. Avnet representatives note the company has made
considerable investments in information technology to support customers. “These
investments in information technology have brought us the capability to conduct
over 9 million daily commerce transactions through our Electronic Commerce
Gateway and Demand Planning System,” says Greg Frazier, Avnet’s SVP of supply
chain services worldwide. The company’s e-procurement support is also geared to
worldwide usage. “Our global IMS [integrated materials services] customers are
linked through our SAP enterprise platform, which provides multi-region
currency and language capabilities.”
Arrow
Electronics Inc. in Melville, N.Y. also offers a wide range of e-procurement
services. Arrow’s connection to customers is its Connectivity Dashboard. The
platform supports a number of e-procurement services, including connecting
customers through advanced infrastructure expertise. That allows customers to
integrate into Arrow’s local sales offices and back-end systems. The
connectivity allows customers to take ordering, acknowledgement and invoicing
data into their own enterprise business systems.
In
addition to the Connectivity Dashboard, Arrow offers a PRO-Series of tools that
provide any-time, any-where access to customer-specific order and account
management information as well as component research capabilities that include
part search, data sheet access and bill-of-materials management. Another
automated tool available through Arrow is the Arrow Alert, which is a web-based
service that provides real-time notifications regarding critical changes such
as end-of-life notices and procurement risk factors. These alerts are
specifically tied to the parts designated by the customer as parts to monitor.
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