retail

distribution

manufacturing

transportation

catalog

sales and marketing

publishing

petro-chemical

pharmaceuticals

leasing and rentals

telecommunications

Isn't floor or store retail similar to unassisted Internet selling?

Besides the obvious differences like customer method of access to making a purchase and the Internet itself offering 24X7 access, there are some subtle differences.

Customer support of the purchase in the retail environment is fulfilled by the physical and visual presence of the goods and/or an expert explanation of the goods and services. In the Internet environment these sale process assistors must be simulated.

Retail transactions are recorded immediately after the customer is satisfied they can take their purchase home with them or some convention is in place that assures them their purchases will come following a familiar process. The Internet purchase of hard goods is always a stretch for the consumer.

Retail generally receives payment before delivery and the customer is more committed to take the goods. Internet purchases can be reversed (cancelled, returned) at a higher or ( sometimes) much higher rate because of the lack of customer personal commitment. Good return authorization procedures, superior inspection, and transporter accountability (care and diligence) are paramount to ensure delivered goods stay at the customer site or are returned successfully.

Retail has a merchandising component with distributed inventory as cost of sale while the Internet allows for demand based stocking.

Retail can be complemented by the Internet, and the Internet can be complemented by retail.

These are a few of the differences.

What about cash handling in the retail and Internet selling environment?

Besides the obvious one, 'you cannot pay for goods or services across the Internet with cash', reconciliation and posting can easily be automated in the Internet environment.

In addition sales settlement can be automated and settled by a third party more easily using e-commerce and this gives the retailer greater control over the entire financial retail sale process.

What about inventory handling in the bricks and mortar selling environment versus on the Internet?

Attributing sales to a location or method in the retail environment is simple for the most part, but does become more complex when this is joined with automated replenishment. Location, time of year (seasonal), pricing, and promotion success give immediate feedback in the retail environment but inventory levels are impossible to predict as a by-product of the line of business.

Inventory levels are difficult to predict in the Internet environment and made somewhat more difficult by the lack of face to face contact (direct selling). The degree varies by line of business and culture.

What is the ideal balance between bricks and mortar for selling versus the Internet?

There is no definite answer to this and the boundaries are being pushed back every day motivated by retail operations' desires to reduce cost of sales. Generally speaking having someone to re-assure the customer of what they will receive even if not in person is better than not. Be prepared for for higher rates of return of goods for Internet sales than retail/bricks and mortar sales.

Reduced price and increased convenience are what customers expect to receive if they purchases goods or services across the Internet.

What is the advantage to the use of the Internet to assist in the movement of inventory?

The advantage of Internet assisting distribution is considerably less if the Internet selling/ordering system is not integrated into the back-office system.

If a distribution/replenishment/VMI process has visibility to the Internet the information can be published. If published (or if the subscription service is offered and accepted) the distributed to transporter/inspector/government agency/service provider by subscription implies a willingness to reduce distribution channel friction in return for convenience.

The next level above this is dispute settlement/negotiation using the Internet. There are good technologies that can be tailored to do this today however expect to make an investment of company expertise to teach the system 'the language of your trade'.

These examples of process friction reduction are only really feasible using the Internet...the technology to do otherwise (like EDI) is too expensive.

What about traditional measurements of inventory/stocking success like turns and ROI, do they apply to Internet assisted distribution?

Most of the traditional benefit 'fat' has already been trimmed from traditional inventory success measurements. Inventory turns are expected (today) to be performed within a thirty day period in all industries except engineered to order (due to project duration, progress payment and difficulty in accountability rendering) and process manufacturing (due to difficulty of revenue/unit attribution).

The new Internet inspired 'wins' involve more complex solutions like item unification (synchronize your product number with your suppliers, engineering, manufacturing, selling, and product lifecycle), accurate demand forecasting, and future visibility into requirements. This does dictate that companies look to CRM and sales cycle visibility and accurate historical information and context to get maximum benefits.

The new mantra for larger companies is item performance. Simply speaking item performance is equal to selling price plus value of service contracts less unit cost, overhead, cost of sales, and cost of support/warranty. In this scenario a true unit cost (item performance) may not be known for one or more lifecycles.

Without this, today's companies can be bankrupt without knowing.

What about order processing across the Internet?

It can generally be said that companies that understand their non-technical business well enough to create an order processing and inventory accounting backlog, do not understand the technical means to evaluate using Internet technologies to reduce the back-log. In other words Internet services scalability implementation is critical to the success of an unattended order processing system that uses the Internet, but the expertise to design and implement this is mostly a 'black art' except for those individuals who gained experience at Internet companies successfully dealing with unattended high volumes.

Internet technical expertise does not have understanding volume distribution, order processing and logistics as pre-requisites to success. If your company has a problem dealing with transaction and fulfillment processing obligations today, especially if you are already using an unattended system (like EDI based for instance) then it is certain that the Internet solution will have the same bottlenecks.

What about fulfillment using the Internet as an instrument to reduce cost and increase efficiency?

Until recently the use of e-commerce assistance to increase fulfillment velocity had some pretty traditional constraints. These constraints were government and  transport companies.

Change of ownership (as it always has been) can only take place when the customer signs for the goods 'in good condition' and companies that think 'we already have the money (consumer distribution) or we have a legal contract (client distribution) therefore our obligation is finished' are dead wrong.

It is not goods out and cash in that determines success for companies today. It is customer satisfaction that will enable you as a company to reduce your cost of sales and distribution...a supplier/client partnership.

Government and transport companies recognize that increasing their efficiency means better control over their own policies and business (and therefore reduced or static costs). These traditional technology laggards, especially government, benefit considerably from early warning by distributing companies.

What are the main advantages for manufacturers that choose to use Internet technologies to assist them in day-to-day activities?

The Internet provides the following advantages for manufacturers:

1. Gives manufacturers 7X24 in and outbound access to suppliers, contractors and customers.
2. Increased integration of disparate manufacturing and business management systems through Internet dictated integration conventions. The best manufacturing ERP system is probably not the best overall financial management ERP system. Manufacturing systems have the intent to breakdown items into components and smaller for manufacturing management purposes while finance systems do their best work consolidating (rolling up) costs and revenues from the item level upwards to product group, division etc. Internet based satellite systems can combine or break apart an item (a configurator), contributing to the over-all process efficiency while speeding up or slowing down to meet the information and process requirements of an ERP system(s).
3. Short and medium term production planning increase in velocity. If your company has small production runs based upon organizational flexibility (or line of business) that are profitable on average, immediate unassisted integration of accurate orders to the order processing system enables quick response. Most companies struggle in identifying unit costs which is a far distance from profit requirements planning (PRP) exerting control over what a manufacturer should manufacture.
4. Production/warehouse handling requirements/VMI visibility. In a properly implemented e-commerce system identity resolution and identity safe-guarding is not a channel threatening concern. If you can trust the person (identity) that provides you with supply and demand requirements, you can rely on assisting information or requested information being valid. The Internet adds transparency to buy, sell, service, project, and financial processes.
5. Automated government compliance. A company manufacturing goods for inter-state/International commerce especially where regulatory compliance is an issue, can increase customer satisfaction directly and indirectly by 'publishing' up-to-date records that reflect the entire manufacturing process from source to current target to the regulating government agencies. The Internet was made for government interaction.
6. Aggregation of disparate automated processes not related to the manufacturer's core business. The best example of this is supplier/contractor/customer security/credit/business checks. A credit check for instance follows a pretty predictable if far-flung process life of its own. The kernel of the credit process may go in and out of 'the firewall' 10 times before a single transaction (demand creation) can take place.

What is an example of a critical concern for a manufacturing company using the Internet to support a direct distribution system?

Order absorption and timely, personalized notifications.

Many companies allow orders to enter their system that will have to re-written to meet a basic standard of accuracy, slow down orders in order to do quality inspection even though this does mean a delay in shipping or promised fulfillment date for these orders, or allow orders (and implied commitments) into systems that are not attached to their production system(s) and therefore creating expectations that probably will not be met.

The true value of a fulfillment system is accurate order information being used as the basis for a manageable, profitable fulfillment strategy. Any bubble in the ordering/fulfillment process can be alleviated by anticipating the likely errors your clients and suppliers will make by looking at the intent of the customer or supplier (the context). Intent has a higher probability of being known if all fields of the order (using a database term) can be evaluated and resolved (content) by a flexible buy/sell/service/project/finance dispute resolution framework that assumes (can assume) rules of behavior.

Keeping the supplier, contractor etc. notified of the status of a process keeps everyone productive and acting in the group common good (since the reason that you allow this type of information sharing is because you have a shared interest). Black-hole delays can threaten the value of a trust relationship at the corporate and personal level therefore identify issues quickly, resolve them expeditiously, and keep your partners informed...and never refuse an order without subjecting the decision to someone in the sales, production, and finance domain.

In manufacturing any misjudgment coming from the pressure of the unknown or unwanted order will add additional delays to fulfillment because of goods and services lack of preparedness and the lack of ability to (likely) perform proper planning.

What manufacturing specialty, discrete, process, or engineered to order (assemble to order, configure to order) will benefit most from use of the Internet?

The greatest potential for gains is in the ETO/ATO/CTO space because of the high number of variables that are open to cost and time saving.

An ETO firm can control the time and expense of acquiring the project by collaborative engineering. Once acquired they can trim the price of start-up to perform the project tasks by collaborating with outside designers and consultants. The ETO manufacturer increase the profit outlook for an acquired project through controlling the pace of design and approval, and the best way of doing this is through a robust collaborative technology infrastructure.

Another way of positively controlling the outcome of an ETO/ATO/CTO project is for the manufacturer to constrain design to use the maximum number of components already in-house or available through suppliers that provide price and profit advantage. A manufacturer must resolve, at a minimum, its E-BOM with its 'convert to service BOM' of the entire assembly in order to take meaningful advantage of this. The larger the company, the more diverse the products, the greater the savings potential. Item unification does require ubiquitous  collaboration between exposed buy, sell, and service catalogs whose content is drawn from back-end ERP systems and quality controlled by EAI integrations governed by line of business rules.

The granular nature of item components (configurations) when well-known, and provided there is a trust relationship with suppliers, allows for minimum inventory to be carried. If inventories and commitments are known across divisions, then relative to revenue, the cost of inventory decreases even more. The Internet and e-commerce allow buyers and sellers to collaborate on fulfilling end customer orders through the exchange of well-structured catalog information and either a good relationship with suppliers for procurement or well understood metrics for purchase via anonymous sourcing.

A considerable cost to ETO/ATO/CTO and contract manufacturers is the cost and risk associated with getting the business. Any information from the proposal and negotiation process that can be specifically re-used for contract development, sourcing/procurement, production planning, and re-used for future proposals reduces the cost of sales for the manufacturer.

Another quick win for manufacturers in the ETO/ATO/CTO and project manufacturing space is through Internet integrations of satellite specialty systems into ERP and legacy back-ends to smoothen the resource scheduling for manufacturing/project activities. This at the very least will reduce the channel supplier/manufacturing channel irritation and at its most valuable increase the opportunity to judge (especially) project windows better. Collaborative infrastructures ensure maximum advantage is taken of this process history.

Finally, neither the last nor the least way for ETO/ATO/CTO/project manufacturers to benefit from deployment of Internet technologies is in service, support and warranty program management. Here technologies like product lifecycle management, product data management, catalog management, customer/contractor and supplier portals, simple and compound messaging, and identity resolution minimize the effort required to maintain value chain satisfaction. By having a secure, credible Internet infrastructure and consistent outbound designed integrations to satellite and legacy systems, the need for spastic (costly, reactive) events is reduced.

Companies have a variety of  transportation options they can consider today. While the role of the Internet in buy, sell, service, manufacturing, project, and financial extends the reach of a company with minor additional expense and considerable overall savings, proper transportation networks can be a very good way to increase profitability.

Consider a company with 6 manufacturing sites worldwide, sales offices in 60 countries, and the guarantee of 'shipping included' as an incentive for customers to use the Internet. Does the Internet undermine the local sales offices and office overhead rationalization making these offices even less feasible?

The obvious question is 'what is this particular company's line of business...are they required to meet some customers face-to-face?' If yes then the cost savings and efficiencies need to be pulled from the logistics system or from the supply chain itself. Supply chain in this example means locating distribution points in places where they will have the maximum impact. In this case a supply chain design is the right initial cost savings method.

Should distribution be co-located? Should fulfillment be performed via a fulfillment house? What about closing sales offices and supporting an indirect channel via the Internet?

Logistics/transportation sourcing - If the sum total of all the capacity for road transportation in the US is equal to 100% and transport rates are based on 70% capacity (higher per unit cost), one use of the Internet will be to provide a marketplace for capacity. A transport requiring company can then access capacity on a demand basis.

Given that use of the Internet has implied expectations of reliability and quality of delivery service, capacity pooling and marketplaces is probably not the best way to supply customers on a regular basis. The advantage will decline the more borders a transporter has to cross to deliver the goods.

Sharing information with your transport provider - When is an order firm, how many daily orders can a supplier expect to be required to transport, and where are the orders going? What about special delivery instructions, special good status (HAZMAT), and customs documents or applications to government agencies for approvals.

Transportation is a collaborative activity where manufacturers. sales agencies/divisions, and transportation suppliers work together to provide delivery predictability and quality assurance to a customer already skittish with purchasing across the Internet or because coaxed into a cost of sales reduction partnership with the goods supplier. The company that transports goods that are the direct result of an Internet transaction is an extension of the manufacturer/sales organization. A successful transportation plan provides costs savings, reduced delivery times (sales finalizations, goods receipt), and increased customer satisfaction when it is combined with information sharing, most cost effectively done using the Internet.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT AND PORTALS: CHICKENS AND EGGS - Although enterprise portal frameworks put "better faces" on intranets/extranets and can generate significant ROI, they do not replace a sound Web content management (WCM) strategy and infrastructure. Together, they provide a Web content creation/delivery infrastructure and a framework for contextual application delivery/navigation. Few vendors (e.g., Vignette, Gauss, Day, Hyperwave) offer integrated portal and WCM capabilities; most (e.g., Interwoven, IntraNet Solutions, Plumtree, PeopleSoft, Sybase, IBM) partner to provide best-of-breed facilities (or customer choice). Users must have a WCM strategy prior to portal framework implementation to provide organizational consistency and identify content, application, collaboration, and infrastructure integration points. Bottom Line: A sound content management strategy should precede a portal strategy. Users should note the growing (but slow) convergence between the two areas and determine focus (e.g., personalized publishing vs. application integration or knowledge management) when making decisions. (AMR, 2002)

Procurement use case

An existing ERP owner purchases an extended direct procurement system (collaborative procurement) to handle known suppliers (AML for advanced manufacturer list), known and approved products, from supplier sales systems at pre-agreed upon (contract pricing).

The procuring customer may use some pre-agreed upon market standard for commercial settlement (OBI, RosettaNet). This is incidental to the catalog requirement.

In the direct procurement scenario, vendors to the procuring customer are responsible for providing an updated list of products, descriptions, specifications, and pricing to their client. It is likely that this list(s) will come from numerous vendors at various times and for various reasons. The vendors are providing a value-added service to customers by maintaining accurate and timely information with regard to the products that have been approved for purchase requisitioning by the procuring customer requisitioners.

In this type of ‘direct procurement’ our customer example may choose to go to the vendor site (this presupposes that the customer has an item master file created that mirrors the vendor item price and description within their ERP system) to purchase. For direct procurement in the mid-size marketplace, and given that for A/P reconciliation (and the difficulty of creating and maintaining item master files for each unique purchase) is a costly, time-consuming process, the catalog (catalog management system) is assumed to be hosted by the customer, encompassed within the customer security umbrella (policies for Internet commerce and for customer internal approval of requisitions), but is updated (refreshed) by hopeful vendors.

In this case the source of the catalog information (content) is the ERP system at the customer sites) (de facto).

Vendor updating is required in order for E-Procurement to remain competitive.

The receiving format of the catalog from the vendor must be converted to the ‘default’ by someone or some process.

Where there is a product description (specification, adherence to a new standard, link to increasing numbers of divisions (availability) within the customer corporate structure), customer manual intervention must take place to replace the specific description (Word document, PDF file, XML file, illustration) in the customer catalog with the new ‘file’. This must be automated.

Significant control (security) must be placed on the upload process. Important is to have a role for control of certain parts of the customer owned catalog or catalogs delegated to a vendor. The permissions should be delegatable and revocable. There may be different individuals within the same vendor organization that have permissions to upload catalog material. Each catalog update must carry a reference to the date, time, and individual performing the update.

Company, division, partner etc. views of catalogs must be securable and centrally manageable according to role and individual login.

For content coming in from the outside, the vendor catalog updater must have control over the parsing engine, access only their own catalog, and have the opportunity to preview their catalog before ‘posting’.

New purchased items (previously not contained within the ERP system) need to be ‘tagged’ for input into the item master after an ‘agreement to purchase’ trigger has been tripped.

Customer employees or personnel authorized for direct purchasing will probably have unique views of a catalog according to their role in the customer business hierarchy.

Sourcing use case

The purchased items may or may not have been purchased from this supplier before, and the vendor sales can occur anonymously. Ultimately the new source or product information will be targeted for processing by an ERP system.

The catalog content that is searched for a ‘match’ with required specifications can be outside of the customer site or may also be uploaded from content providers. The content providers are firms that specialize in providing products (items) from vendors in groups that represent extensive and timely industry specific information.

The receiving format must be converted to the ‘default’ or format accessible by the customer.

Some mediation of the content between engineering, purchasing, the content provider, and the reconciliation with the item master files is required. This requires a staging area where the input content format is parsed for formatting accuracy (predicted input) and relationship to formatted content from the ERP system.

Exceptions (formatting deltas) must be communicated to the catalog manager for the following actions:

1.      Review

2.      Substitution

3.      Completion

4.      Updating ERP item master files

Inbound content must be formatted in some standard taxonomy structure, or at the very worst, a format that is map able to the taxonomy of the customer system.

New purchased items (previously not contained within the ERP system) need to be ‘tagged’ for input into the item master after an ‘agreement to purchase’ trigger has been tripped.

Company, division, partner etc. views of catalogs must be securable and centrally manageable according to role and individual login.

The sourcing system owner may use some pre-agreed upon market standard for commercial settlement (OBI, RosettaNet). This is incidental to the catalog requirement.

For content coming in from the outside, the vendor catalog updater must have control over the parsing engine, access only their own catalog, and have the opportunity to preview their catalog before ‘posting’ or committing.

Sales use case

The source of catalog content for this example is assumed to be primarily an ERP system. This is likely the case 100% of the time when the manufacturer is performing direct sales only. If the manufacturer/distributor decides to provide indirect capability (the delegation of privileges to use the e-commerce system to partners, brokers, agents, re-sellers and distributors) then the sources of information become more widely varied. For example content may:

1.      Be updated from alternate sources, with date, time, and author information attached.

2.      Be updated from alternate sources like marketplaces (in a standard or known format), dealer agent broker and re-seller sources, and alternate ERP system.

3.      Provide unique views of a catalog according to role and/or log-in (company/contract)

4.      Provide the capability for content manager or delegatable authority to update supporting documents/drawings/images (multi-level descriptions) automatically. In the case of documents (Microsoft Word only) the support should be bi-directional (mandatory when synchronization is used) and should be done when a version control repository is used…like InterWoven, Documentum, FileNet, Oracle AFS or PDM/PLM.

In the sale scenario, re-seller, broker, agent and re-seller clients of the selling catalog owner may provide catalog information (an updated list of products, descriptions, specifications, and pricing to the e-commerce site. It is likely that this list(s) will come from numerous partner vendors at various times and for various reasons. In this example the selling e-commerce site owner offers a hosting service to its vendor partners.

Some mediation of the content between engineering, sales, the content provider, and the reconciliation with the legacy back-end item master files is required. This requires a staging area where the input content format is parsed for formatting accuracy (predicted input) and relationship of the target format to the various source formats..

Company, division, partner etc. views of catalogs must be securable and centrally manageable according to role and individual login.

Exceptions (formatting deltas) must be communicated to the catalog manager for the following actions:

1.      Review

2.      Substitution

3.      Completion

4.      Updating ERP item master files

The use of catalogs to present and update configuration information is not a necessity for E-Sales/E-Configuration systems that are bi-directionally connected to an ERP system. In this case the configuration information stored in the 'configuration information files' can be used. The exception to this rule is when the Website is promoting, packaging, and performing cross-sell and up-sell logic.

In this case (non-mandatory configuration) a client wishing to purchase a stereo component system may only know the requirement for the stereo amplifier, and so the catalog should be able to present purchase options at that point. Different packages may be displayed all at once within the limitations of the screen to display the information professionally, or displayed based upon rules.

Inbound content must be formatted in some standard taxonomy structure, or at the very worst, a format that is map able to the taxonomy of the seller e-commerce system.

For content coming in from the outside, the vendor delegated catalog updater (as well as their own updating personnel) must have control over the parsing engine, access only their own catalog, and have the opportunity to preview their catalog before ‘posting’.

Service use case

Ideally a catalog is the best way to find spare or replacement service parts along with varying levels of service supporting documentation.

A catalog is an ideal place to store FAQ information especially when the following conditions exist:

1.     FAQ is updated on a regular basis

2.     FAQ is extended to offer drill-down information like:

·          Problem diagnosis (text, drawings, renderings linked together - then to level 2

·          Once diagnosed what is required to remedy the situation – then to level 3

·          An illustration and explanation on how to rectify the situation which may include a video clip – then to level 4

·          How to test the result, then to level 5

·          Policies and procedures to bring the system/machine back ‘on-line’ then to level 6

·          Forms and documents to fill out, level 7 (FAA example)

3.     Availability of parts and loaners on a service ‘network’. A service network is a collection of ‘spares’ produced to assist field personnel…like a more active ‘micro-fiche’.

4.     Finding and pricing and out of warranty part or any other service

In this application of the catalog, like sales, items are published to a catalog and automatically linked to structured documents. In aerospace and defence (like other regulated industries) one of the conventions is that an item has a single document linked to it, but the components within the document are reusable for sales, marketing (high level), certification, FAA approval, regulatory context, its manufacturing or fabrication process and history, along with the same information about nested items (components within a configuration or an assembly). The item document may be viewed from many different perspectives (multiple views, reusable information). In the case of A+D in particular, individual item document components are regularly updated and changed…re-packaged.

Service catalog components will:

1.      Be updated from alternate sources, with date, time, and author information attached.

2.      Be updated from alternate sources like marketplaces (in a standard or known format), dealer agent broker and re-seller sources, and alternate ERP system.

3.      Provide unique views of a catalog according to role and/or log-in (company/contract)

4.      Provide the capability for content manager or delegatable authority to update supporting documents/drawings/images (multi-level descriptions) automatically. In the case of documents (Microsoft Word only) the support should be bi-directional (mandatory when synchronization is used) and should be done when a version control repository is used…like InterWoven, Documentum, FileNet, Oracle AFS or PDM/PLM.

Some mediation of the content between engineering, service, the content provider, and the reconciliation with the legacy back-end item master files is required. This requires a staging area where the input content format is parsed for formatting accuracy (predicted input) and relationship to formatted content from the ERP system.

Company, division, partner etc. views of catalogs must be securable and centrally manageable according to role and individual login.

Exceptions (formatting deltas) must be communicated to the catalog manager for the following actions:

1.      Review

2.      Substitution

3.      Completion

4.      Updating ERP item master files

The receiving format must be converted to the ‘default’.

Inbound content must be formatted in some standard taxonomy structure, or at the very worst, a format that is map able to the taxonomy of the owner of the service system.

Promotions -

Promotions are generally offered to increase what is called ‘traffic’. By advertising a promotion companies are hoping their clients will focus in and buy a product or products that are promoted. Promotions are always based upon a period of time offered. What this means is that goods are sold at promotional prices for ’30 days’ (for instance). By law (in NA) goods need to be advertised or sold at a ‘higher price’ before they are promoted and they must return to the ‘higher price’ after they are promoted (for a period of time that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction).

Promotion is generally done using one of the following methods:

1.       Price or percentage reduction on all products, or on all products of a certain type, or of all products of a certain type from a manufacturer, of all products from a certain manufacturer; and on selected products only. The closer the sales model is to B-to-C the more likely that they will promote larger numbers of products.

2.       Buy something and get something for free.

3.       Buy a group of goods (4 items and the fifth at 50% off within a certain period of time) from a particular manufacturer and receive a discount, rebate or ‘free goods’.

4.       Savings through purchasing related ‘lite configuration components’. (packages)

The reasons for promotion, besides hopefully creating ‘traffic’ or ‘interest’ and orders are:

1.       Seasonal change

2.       Discontinuation of a model or product

3.       Competitive pressure

4.       Over-stock

5.       Special pricing from suppliers. In this case the additional discounts from suppliers may take the form of reduced cost, rebates, incentives (higher discount level for all succeeding orders), or ‘co-op’. Co-op is a unique form of ‘special pricing’ that allows suppliers to reward their customers with ‘off the books’ cash ‘rebates.

There is a great deal of tension around the definition of publishing. Historically this discussion used to center around techdocs versus periodical, advertising, newspaper and magazine publishing. The answer to the question 'which system should I use' was answered this way, 'if you are doing a publication of XX number of pages or less use Quark and/or PageMaker while if you intend documents/publications that are XXXX pages long, undergoing constant revision, and whose content was targeted for reuse use FrameMaker or Interleaf.

Today the assumption is that all information needs to be available for re-purposing at least for the portable document format but probably for XML (or the derivatives) as well. The line between structured content (large publications, regulated industries, management of large databases like Lexis-Nexis) and computer and application instruction or application insertion and derivation (like automatically formatting ERP based item master information associated with marketing materials for use in a sell-side Internet environment) has blurred. Truth in graphics portrayal concerns (true color, screen color versus the pantone color index) have been replaced by multi-media presentation capability as a publishing application differentiator (for example). In short the goal posts for judging publishing method/performance success have changed and in fact the same game is no longer taking place.

It is interesting that people from the SGML world see the reusability and logical and dynamic structuring of information for purpose as a given. It is the current state of publishing that dynamic sources and targets, dynamic purpose, and closer integration of content to legacy systems is very important. The din created by content management, and even further, for content management that is line of business (machinery repair and overhaul for instance) and business function (purchasing content versus sales content) specific has drowned out the need for information planning and the use of proper, powerful content authoring (parsers, conversion) that used to be the given of the SGML/XML world.

The requirements for publishing by a great number of companies (lower the tool usability and pricing bar) has arrived at the point were these companies  can exert power over their information of all types by knowing what business they are in, the conventions of that line of business, and assuming that any publishing they do is at minimum to two formats...XML and one other. This leads us back to a re-look at the original observation, that 'publishing is no longer the same game as it was in the mid-nineties' but rather 'publishing today is a sub-set of what was known to be important by regulated or publication intensive companies but with the addition of richer tools, increased awareness of the principles of information re-usability, and the significant gravity on publishing decisions placed by the Internet and its publishing conventions.'

Regulated industries from the drug producing sector have onerous upfront costs to get their drugs approved. Once approved they face similar onerous constraints in the manufacturing and distribution process.

Content management (drug development and testing, clinical trials), Internet (sharing of proprietary and non-proprietary ideas and processes Internationally), and structured authoring (related to content management) are required for the initial drug preparation for market.

Traceability (nothing new to process manufacturers), recipe management, and materiel testing results for compound or element use within the manufacturing process as well as on the plant floor do make pharmaceutical lead up to, manufacture, and sales and marketing a unique business.

Alberta Canada, and especially Edmonton, is the home to virtually all types of fossil resource based petro-chemical refining and manufacturing activities. Located at the hub of pipelines gathering liquid and gas fuels makes it ideally suited to provide basic fuels and materials at a reasonable price and good predictability for local and international companies.

A pressing and large requirement for manufacturers of products that in large concentrated doses can seriously harm an environment or by-products that can produce harm, is the management of change and re-certification of plant components.

In 1996, 1997 a multi-national company wrestled with the seeming incompatibility of their  change management system deployed in all plants around the world and the systems they were then implementing worldwide to monitor machine activity and provide access to floor personnel. Their challenge was to reconcile a widely held belief in a non-critical to manufacturing area of the company to the mission critical systems required for change management.

Studying the volume of changes that took place across the five geographical facilities (with multiple purpose facilities in each location), the need for a rapid and simple community notification execution plan as part of the company goodwill and compliance (while on the cusp of the impact of the Internet), joined to dynamically changing documents, diagrams, and multi-media was the major challenge.

Sometimes as was the internal debate with this customer, the technology is the critical piece that should not be compromised. By reviewing their previous decisions in the context of current advancements in document/content management and structured authoring this company was able to make a sound business decision.

In another instance, a multi-national petro-chemical facility required HAZMAT/OSHA handling and procedures information to be broadcast for local and International use, audience specific and using the emerging capability of the Internet. In the background the customer also required on-going personnel learning and testing (for compliance) to be conducted. The difficulty here was that the procedures   for handling and transportation were subject to rapid change because of the relative newness and unfamiliar dangers of working with the material in question. The broadcast material was centrally managed and because of the targeted audience and the stated requirement for tactile materials, was developed entirely in Java.

Currently there are European Union laws implemented in each EURO member country whose intent it is to force auto-makers to maintain responsibility for all manufactured vehicles through their entire lifecycle. It is known that the cost of automobiles in Europe is quite prohibitive making the preferred method of 'owning a vehicle' as leasing. That a bank or leasing company owns the asset does not relieve the manufacturer of keeping track of the vehicle.

As a part of business vehicle lease, the cost of repairs and normal warranty items are covered under the leasing contract. In other words whether or not the lease payment covers the cost of regular maintenance or not, drivers are encouraged to take their vehicles in for regular inspections. All maintenance records, accident reports, or police reports are maintained by the leasing company or bank. One such company had 15 million vehicles under lease with 4 - 6 million vehicles coming off lease every year.

Not unlike North America where companies like Ford and General Motors have their own financial arms, the preferred method in the Netherlands at least is for a bank and a vehicle manufacturer to form an alliance. In this way the lease company can become an extension of the manufacturer and vice versa. For example a lease company will gather records about a vehicle through (on average) 8 or 10 interactions a year with the vehicle (of course it is the vehicle's user, maintainer and licensor that actually send information to the leasing company. On the other hand when it comes time for cars to be sold into the market after the lease has run its course, the manufacturer has distribution outlets in every country in Europe and so can help the bank or lease company.

The partnership allows cars to be selected at the bank or leasing company directly from models the manufacturer makes. While most people don't know this fact, automobile manufacturers are constantly changing their models therefore the connection to the manufacturer is a very nice service to offer the business or personal client.

The car (and lease) are matched up after all approvals have been received and the car is delivered and inspected. From this moment on the bank or lease company adds another (approximately) 8 processes to its list of (15 million X 8 =) 120 million processes. While there is no estimate as to the average cost of maintaining a vehicle's record, there are plenty of places where the system can collapse, for instance:

1. Lost or misplaced records (say 5 %)

2. No accurate up to date value of the vehicle inventory versus liability because of sheer volume

3. Vehicle accidents and claims take a considerable amount of time (say 5 % of vehicles go through this)

4. Re-licensing a vehicle is a critical process that involves more than a one step process. Vehicle repairs (warranty or otherwise) take additional time and effort and require a multi-step process.

5. Revenue and liabilities are calculated monthly and numbers are for the most part calculated manually

6. Payouts are calculated on a daily basis and need to be available for any customer at any time.

7. Vehicle disposition is a complex set of variables affecting a number of multi-step processes whose execution does impact the profitability of the business.

8. Vehicle acquisition is about 40 steps is a series of somewhat independent processes

The Internet has reduced the requirement for voice approvals and vehicle selection but is only being applied to other parts of the leasing process today. In other words, as in everything to do with technology, a significant capital investment is required by leasing companies to reduce the overheads while increasing their capacity to operate with larger volumes.

In the Americas, the following is the case:

A business is required to manage incoming orders through to completion and finish with customer satisfaction. Every telecommunications company has the burden of individual and corporate order management made more difficult  by type of services) required to complete the order, the particular quality of services available in a customer geography, the type of employee required to complete the order, scheduling, and commencement of billing.

A telco is a manufacturer of capacity and services that add value to the capacity. By looking at telcos this way it is easy to see them has plants that are widely dispersed with multiple lines of business and many projects in various stages of completion at the same time. Capacity and services are many times extensions of the Internet today, and so the projects are like a combination of construction and information technology projects. Each plant may offer uniform services similar to those offered to the corporation, however each plant may fulfill the services in different ways with different adverse impact on the capacity of that particular part of the network. The capital projects are basic maintenance and future capacity or quality of capacity based and because these projects are always taking place cost of sales is variable and difficult to determine.

There are large volumes of data for billing, aggregating cost per account, and marketing. Rolling revenues up to a single account where client purchase of goods or services may be obscured by corporate location or line of business does make analysis of breadth of services sold to a customer, type of services, and what additional services to market almost impossible to determine. The logistics of selling and follow-up and determination of campaign success are also difficult.

Supplier relationship management is critical in capital intensive businesses like telcos. In exchange for direct customer contact, telcos will sometimes yield up valuable end-customer information to the manufacturer. This serves two purposes; it gives manufacturers (suppliers) visibility into upcoming orders so they can adjust their own manufacturing and sales activities, and it reduces the need for telcos to inventory goods.

Partner relationship management is difficult because the goods and services offered by telcos are usually more complex than normal people are ever expected to understand, yet the ultimate client must provide enough information for the telco to automatically provide what is required. Between telco and customer (partner) there is a galaxy of product specification, pricing, and fulfillment conditions that must be rendered into simple easy to understand offerings. Sales tool design and maintenance is ultimately the responsibility of the telco because so specialized. The telco owns the sales process of its business partners as well because there are so many steps to fulfillment that only the telcos can complete.

These are a few aspects of telecommunications service providers assisted or implemented.