Optus inCITE portal opens doors for PSB in Australia

By ADAM GIFFORD

Procurement specialist PSB Group is making inroads into Australia through its participation in the Construction Industry Trading Exchange's Optus inCITE portal.

Exchange members include six of Australia's largest construction firms.

Optus inCITE includes online tender management, document management and purchasing tools, the last driven by PSB's SupplyNet engine - renamed Conexa for use in Australia because the Supplynet name is already taken across the Tasman.

PSB chief executive Carl Mitchell-Turner said inCITE members had used the site since March. It would be opened up for general use this month..

SupplyNet is built with Commerce One Marketplace 4.6 software, supplemented with some key modules and integration tools built by SupplyNet.

It is used by about 150 New Zealand customers, with PSB using it as a way to expand beyond its original GSB Supplycorp business with Government departments into the private sector.

Mitchell-Turner said it was now doing up to 700,000 transactions a week, with customers ranging from NZI down to small resthomes.

The accounts of parent company Professional Service Brokers for the year ending last June show software costs were just shy of $8 million. Mitchell-Turner puts the cost of the whole SupplyNet development at about $12 million.

That contributed to a group loss of $1.3 million on revenues of $6.1 million. Some $30 million of goods passed through the procurement side of the business.

"By the middle of next year profits should be back to where they were before we embarked on this technology development," Mitchell-Turner said.

He said the market was still slow to embrace e-procurement.

"As an application e-procurement has as much sizzle as accounts payable. The real saving is electronic invoicing.

"Auckland University of Technology got back a third of its first year's investment in the first two weeks because the electronic invoice-matching process discovered a supplier was issuing invoices with errors on the price breaks AUT had negotiated."

Much of the work, as competitors have found, is getting suppliers to participate. The result of most e-procurement transactions is still likely to be a faxed order.

Noel Hamill, Optus general manager for e-business and hosting, said inCITE was an industry-driven initiative which Optus was involved in as a service provider. Optus has used SupplyNet for the past three years to convert supplier catalogues for its own e-procurement portal.

"Now we find the level of experience SupplyNet has around the e-enablement process for suppliers and into government and industry verticals is proving invaluable," said Hamill.