108 – Re-defining B2B Communities through simplified and efficient operations [June 2009]

All organisations profess to be customer focused or customer centric, but in reality many organisation spend more time and effort focused on their suppliers. How can organisations strike the right balance when looking at their end-to-end supply chains? How should they structure their B2B strategies to drive simplicity and efficiency in their day to day operations? During this keynote presentation, Justin will highlight the key issues, raise some interesting cross-industry comparisons and pose some provocative challenges to stimulate our thinking for the rest of the plenary.

Increasing complexity and use of original design manufacturers are changing the way High Tech leaders need to manage their supply chains.  Globalisation and reliance on third parties logistics providers requires real-time visibility and rapid enablement of new channel, such as retail.

IBM recently released the results of its Chief Supply Chain Officer’s Study which included interviews with 400 senior supply chain executives from around the globe. The number one challenge facing supply chain executives today is overwhelming and fragmented data coupled with an inability to make sense out of the information. And as if the lack of visibility wasn’t enough to contend with, supply chain managers are finding themselves trying to simultaneously juggle a host of other added pressures and demands. In his presentation, Laurence will present on the wider findings of this study and the potential implication for the supply chain in the electronics and communications industries.

Any supply chain director will tell you that supply chain visibility is high on their priority list; but fewer have successfully implemented visibility solutions. With increasing pressure for high performing supply chains and recent advances in technology, improved visibility is a must. It improves customer service and is the latest step in enhanced collaboration across the supply chain. Jianglong will discuss the factors that assure successful supply chain visibility programmes, of which the ability to act on acquired data is key.

Emerging requirements from government, the marketplace and your trading partners is driving organisations to focus on their core business.  B2B execution and integration on a global scale is challenging organization to be more nimble than their internal resources can support and many have turned to outsourcing document exchange, eInvoicing and supplier management to provide incremental capabilities to improve their competitiveness.

DHL as an LSP, with a global presence, wider industry coverage  and a massive customer base  has major challenges on the B2B System Integration space. The presentation covers what Enterprise System Integration service (DHL Supply Chain internal regional integration service) has to offer, to overcome some of these challenges through  standardisation, agile internal processes and service consolidation

The idea of this project is to enable SMEs to participate in B2B communication using lean B2B-tools such as Web 2.0-technologies

The European Commission is proposing radical changes to the current eInvoicing Directive. How will this affect EDIFICE members? A quick overview of eInvoicing methods and how you can be sure that you are going to pass a VAT audit

The RosettaNet update for the 108th Plenary focuses on the activities of the community at large. Beginning with an overview of the recently published Implementation Statistics, the presentation will then cover an activity of the Bay Area RosettaNet Deployment (BARD) group in the US, highlights from a few of the Affiliate countries in Asia, and a preview of what RosettaNet Taiwan is planning for the Global Partner Conference in Taipei. Of special note will be a report about the first meeting of several solution providers who formed the SP Forum in April