Collaborate: it's the name of the game

By ADAM GIFFORD*

Forget e-this and i-that. The word businesses must come to terms with over the next year is collaboration.

That's because technology is creating new ways of doing business.

Some of that technology is available now. Some is still on the slide presentations and the road maps.

But if you believe the sales pitch, enterprise software has turned a corner.

At the JD Edwards Nexus user-group conference in Sydney last week, executives from the Denver company spelled out where they were taking their software.

David Siebert, vice-president for worldwide software and channel operations, said ERP (enterprise resource planning) software had been successful at allowing companies to streamline processes internally.

"It's harder to streamline processes when half those processes are outside your four walls," he said.

"The next step in e-business is all about collaboration - how to optimise your supply chain."

Supply chain guru John Gattorna, a senior partner with consulting firm Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting), said companies going down the e-business path should not forget that the foundation of good business today in the supply chain "is good old operational excellence - get your tracking right, get utilisation of your warehousing right, control your inventories, do all those basic things."

"The only problem is, that's not enough to grow at the rate many of you want to grow."

Mr Gattorna said companies that in the past might have been "buried" in huge ERP implementations must learn new skills to work collaboratively.

Companies in Australia and New Zealand had been slow to adopt e-business, and risked being left behind.

He said chief executives should be looking for projects that addressed all companies in a supply chain, because the future model of competition was not competing companies but competing networks.

But there are significant barriers to collaboration: internal inflexibility, problems integrating proprietary software, and the lock-in effect from becoming too reliant on a vendor.

To help customers over these barriers, JD Edwards spent $US30 million ($70 million) on technology to create a middleware layer it calls XPI, (eXtended Process Integration).

Andrew Moore, director of collaborative solutions, said: "Stuff we have already facilitates basic, standards-based, point-to-point connectivity.

"XPI is there for much more complex, real-time integrations ... where you want an infrastructure that is able to plug other things in as you need to, whether internal stuff or external."

Customers wanted supply chain collaborative planning and forecasting capabilities, CRM (customer relationship management), electronic procurement of direct and indirect goods, knowledge management and business intelligence.

"You also want to plug and play with other trading partners, suppliers, wholesalers or distributors using whatever technology infrastructure or standards they might have to use."

* Adam Gifford attended the Nexus user-group conference in Sydney as a guest of JD Edwards.

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