Case Study — Trading Partner Connectivity

Background

There is tremendous interest today in eProcurement systems, eBusiness, and connecting trading partner systems together. The return on investment is significant for each process that can eliminate manual, and traditionally, paper-based transactions. Operational systems meet with limited success in today's market. Connecting with trading partners has been difficult for businesses of all sizes. Companies do not have either the financial or technical resources to develop a system that will automate and streamline processes making these transactions more efficient.

The Situation

Organizations each have their own best-practices for handling and processing transactional documents. Typically this involves a series of manual tasks including for example receiving the purchase order, order entry, shipping and handling, invoice and payment. While this scenario seems relatively straightforward, there are many areas introducing complexities. For example, processing a change order, invoice reconciliation, pricing change, or returns management. For large organizations (and even smaller ones) processing these transactions off-line in a manual manner is both cost-prohibitive and error prone.

All organizations can agree that there is significant return on investment to automate and bring these transactions on-line. Disagreement stems from defining the best-practices to connect trading partner systems together. Where this has been accomplished, the majority involve solutions where the larger trading partner enforces its solution (and way of doing business) onto the smaller organization. These systems fail to meet the full potential ROI companies seek simply due to the fact that the focus of both trading partners is not taken into full consideration in the solution. No complementary systems exist providing easy, cost-effective, and flexible onramps for trading partners to connect, while preserving best-practices within each organization.

The Solution

Conuity can help you address your connectivity concerns, in addition to flexible business processes associated with your trading partners. Both sides of the trading partner equation can have flexibility in the management of processes surrounding the partnership while meeting the requirements of its trading partners. Each party greatly benefits by providing services where processes are automated and manual intervention is minimized.

Our Business process approach provides automation of many business tasks performed manually today. By providing services that preserve and enhance best-practices within each organization, both parties become more efficient and predictable, and both parties greatly benefit. Implemented properly the solution enables organizations to improve the quality, integrity, efficiency and performance within their organization.

Conuity products are designed to be easy-to-use, flexible, and provide immediate benefits. When implementing a trading partner initiative, it is easy to become overwhelmed with impending variations involved in complex trading partner agreements. Our approach is to start small and implement a singular initiative thereby becoming familiar with the system and its capabilities. Once this is completed, online and transactional, continuously improve the system by modifying the process or extending into new business processes.

Taking this approach leads to immediate ROI, and vigor to enhance and extend the system to maximize the performance within your organization. For example, the first process implemented might involve online receipt of the purchase order, online acceptance by users defined with a role to do so, followed by online shipment notification. This business process would eliminate any order entry capabilities, and provides an audit trail of each purchase order received. Adding invoicing (both send and receive) to this would eliminate manual invoice reconciliation, a costly manual process, with a significant ROI.

The Results

• Conuity enables your organization to:
• Improve internal business process while satisfying a larger trading partner's requirements.
• Eliminate manual processes.
• Flexibility and ease in the definition and modification of business processes.
• Reduce paperwork freeing the organization to focus on patient care and revenue-generating activities.
• Insure that individuals have access to the most appropriate information, when they need it, in order to make more informed decisions.
• Deliver actionable information to executives and front-line employees.
• Set alerts and notifications for situations.
• Support auditing of information access and dissemination.
• Empower management to measure performance and quickly implement change to improve business processes.
• Identify areas where process and policy can be used to improve the performance of the organization.