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整理人: hnyjchuhong(2002-04-10 01:24:33), 站内信件
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Next generation e-business
solutions for energy industry
collaboration
The relentless pace of change being created by the dynamism of the New Economy leaves energy companies
today faced with many options when it comes to choosing electronic procurement and collaborative tools.
However, a recent alliance of two leading software companies to provide a new, unique solution, is already
being dubbed the “dream team” for the New Economy. It heralds the arrival of the next generation of
e-marketplace and e-procurement solutions and, based on the level of interest already shown by some
of the leading global energy players, the alliance is already capturing the industry’s imagination
SAP and Commerce One announced
in June that they are to jointly
deliver the next generation e-business
solutions for the internet
economy. SAPMarkets, the SAP subsidiary,
which spearheads all business-to-business
e-marketplace activities of the parent company,
is in charge of directing and managing
this alliance.
The SAPMarkets & Commerce One
alliance aims to revolutionise business by
offering companies one-stop shopping for
the entire range of e-business marketplace
services. The joint solutions for e-procurement
and e-marketplace being developed
by the alliance offer services ranging from
collaborative design through fulfilment,
including industry-based content services
and business intelligence. The marketplace
suite will transform linear, serial supply
chains to parallel, collaborative communities,
dramatically reducing cycle times,
improving customer relationships and
increasing productivity for businesses worldwide,
including the energy sector.
Combined strengths
The alliance combines the strengths of both
companies. Under the terms of the agreement,
SAPMarkets & Commerce One will
jointly develop the e-marketplace and e-procurement
solutions as well as selling and
marketing them. The new solutions will provide
customers with highly capable, open
marketplace technology, e-business applications
and delivery capabilities in a single
solution providing unprecedented opportunities
for customers. To create the joint solutions,
Commerce One contributed its expertise
in the infrastructure that enables companies
to establish and operate trading portals,
and SAPMarkets provided services for
supply chain and product life-cycle management,
customer relationship management
and business intelligence, based upon the
existing applications developed by SAP.
The three companies have, together, dedicated
4,000 people to the global effort of
realising their common vision. An alliance
development “road-map” has been finalised
through June 2001 involving 17 joint teams
and over 1,300 developers around the
world. Component development and syndication
with customers and partners is also
already under way. The two companies are
carrying out joint marketing of the alliance
and have taken the solution on the road
across the globe.
According to Hasso Plattner, chief executive
of SAP and SAPMarkets, the combined
efforts of the companies will enable them
“to achieve our mutual view of a frictionless
economy”. He added: “Our 13,000 customers
want a single, market-leading ebusiness
marketplace solution to harness
the power of the internet.” It is a vision
shared by Mark Hoffman, chairman and
chief executive of Commerce One. “This
dream team of industry leaders will deliver
the collaborative marketplace of the future.
Our exchange partners worldwide are
demanding industry-leading e-business
applications. This is a huge win for the
entire internet economy.”
In August, the global Mining and Metals
Marketplace selected SAPMarkets &
Commerce One as its preferred technology
provider to the new e-commerce marketplace.
The new mining and metals virtual
marketplace will utilise a common catalogue
of products in multiple languages and will
allow participants, regardless of size and
location, to access and trade with a large
pool of suppliers both locally and around the
world. In 1999, the estimated procurement
spending of the industry was around
$200bn. The marketplace is expected to
begin processing transactions during the
fourth quarter of this year.
In a press release, announcing the selection
of SAPMarkets & Commerce One, Tracy
Stevenson, interim chief executive, said the
marketplace had conducted “a very comprehensive
evaluation process with the leading
technology suppliers”. He added:
“Commerce One/SAPMarkets … best
demonstrated its capability and commitment
to providing the advanced technology
solutions that will transform the procurement
processes of buyers and sellers
throughout the global mining, metals and
Next generation e-business
solutions for energy industry
collaboration
Sponsored Statement
The relentless pace of change being created by the dynamism of the New Economy leaves energy companies
today faced with many options when it comes to choosing electronic procurement and collaborative tools.
However, a recent alliance of two leading software companies to provide a new, unique solution, is already
being dubbed the “dream team” for the New Economy. It heralds the arrival of the next generation of
e-marketplace and e-procurement solutions and, based on the level of interest already shown by some
of the leading global energy players, the alliance is already capturing the industry’s imagination
Top: Hasso Plattner, chief executive, SAP and
SAPMarkets
Below: Mark Hoffman, chairman and chief
executive, Commerce One
e-business solutions
minerals industry.” The 16 equity participants
in the marketplace are: Alcan
Aluminium; Alcoa; Anglo American; Barrick
Gold; BHP; Codelco; CVRD; De Beers; Inco;
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter; Newmont
Mining; Noranda; Pechiney; Phelps Dodge;
Rio Tinto; and WMC.
The SAPMarkets & Commerce One team
has also captured the imagination of the
energy industry with the announcement in
August – only weeks after the agreement
was unveiled – that a preliminary memorandum
of understanding has been signed with
Enporion, the global e-marketplace for the
energy and utility industry.
Early success
Enporion, founded by Allegheny Energy, New
Century Energies, Minnesota Power,
Northern States Power, and PPL is due to be
open for commercial operation by the end of
this year and represents the SAPMarkets &
Commerce One alliance’s first North
American customer. Definitive agreements
between the alliance members and Enporion
are expected in the third quarter. According
to SAPMarkets president, Mayur Shah, the
deal “offers Enporion unprecedented collaborative
supply-chain capabilities that allow
buyers and sellers to control inventories and
business transactions across company
boundaries in a single solution”.
The energy industry is facing significant
change with the combined challenges of
deregulation and the demands of adapting
to the new economy. Announcing its preliminary
agreement, Enporion board member
and vice-president of information technology
at Minnesota Power, Claudia Scott Welty,
said the solution from SAPMarkets &
Commerce One “provides us with the technology
and relationship building power to
stay competitive”.
The deal serves as a demonstration of
how the alliance will
benefit customers.
The marketplace will
link Enporion buyers
and suppliers to
boost business relationships
and profitability.
Each
Enporion participant
is expected to benefit
from reduced cycle
times, lower inventories
and reduced
transaction costs.
Suppliers will enjoy
seamless interfaces
with buyers, exposure
to new markets and
more standardised
processes. Buyers
will gain access to new suppliers and enjoy
a streamlined supply chain process and
lower operating costs. “We believe that
Enporion exemplifies the power of the
SAPMarkets & Commerce One alliance and
our joint efforts to move the world’s business
onto the Internet,” said Chuck
Donchess, executive vice-president and
chief strategy officer for Commerce One.
e-solutions
So just what will the two companies be bringing
to the market? MarketSet and
EnterpriseBuyer combine Commerce One’s
leading e-marketplace infrastructure and
B2B solutions with e-procurement, supplychain,
product planning, and analysis applications
from SAP and SAPMarkets. The joint
offering leverages the two companies respective
strengths and creates unprecedented
opportunities for customers. It is being rolled
out on a phased basis, a process that has
already got under way and is being be comarketed,
co-delivered and co-supported.
SAPMarkets is located in Palo Alto, the heart
of Silicon Valley, and a joint go-to-market
strategy has been introduced with short
development cycles to meet ever-shortening
internet timeframes.
MarketSet is the first comprehensive emarketplace
solution suite to include collaborative
supply chain capabilities and business
process analytics. MarketSet is designed to
transform linear, serial supply chains to parallel,
collaborative communities, eliminating
tier-to-tier confusion and dramatically reducing
order-to-delivery cycle times, improving
customer relationships and increasing productivity
for businesses worldwide.
MarketSet’s open architecture ensures
that the e-marketplace is open to virtually
any buying, selling and enterprise application
on-ramp; open for marketplace-to-marketplace
transactions; and open for the
easy deployment of value-added capabilities
and services, such as auctions, multiple
payment methods, content sourcing and
services, logistics and many others.
MarketSet offers customers the ability to
establish a branded e-marketplace, manage
transactions, rapidly integrate value-added
business services, and manage a community
of users. It also provides complete, endto-
end content management to address the
entire B2B life cycle, bringing new levels of
automation and scalability to critical content
management processes.
In essence the alliance offers an unparalleled
e-marketplace solution aimed at market
makers. The services will be bundled with all
the tools needed to operate marketplaces.
Deep supply-chain functionality and services
included in the package are: collaborative
design; planning; procurement; analysis;
order management; and content management,
amongst many others. In terms of
connectivity, the solution embraces all major
marketplace protocols and standards. It
operates on an open, on-ramp model and
permits any-to-any transaction processing
from marketplace to marketplace.
EnterpriseBuyer is the first suite of buying
solutions that goes beyond simple cata-
Sponsored Statement
SAPMarkets is located in Palo Alto in the heart of the internet economy
e-business solutions
logue ordering. Providing dynamic procurement
of direct goods and management of all
facets of the supply chain, EnterpriseBuyer
offers two deployment options:
l The professional edition enables the
dynamic procurement of direct goods,
automating and integrating with the full
range of business processes required for
buying complex products, parts and supplies,
including bill of materials, materials
management, contract buying, configured
goods, plant maintenance, warehousing and
integration with business intelligence.
l The desktop edition provides users with a
business-wide self-service web solution for
catalogue buying of indirect goods and basic
procurement activities.
Transitions from previous e-marketplace
and e-procurement solutions from SAP and
Commerce One are fully supported.
Industry-focused solutions
SAP has a long history of strong industry orientation,
including the oil and gas sector,
through its mySAP.com Oil & Gas solution.
It also has leading e-business applications,
for example, in supply chain management
and engineering collaboration. The alliance
with CommerceOne enhances this vision
and has captured the energy sector’s imagination.
Commerce One adds to SAP’s
strengths through its global, e-commerce
solutions for business. Now, these strengths
are being combined and deployed for the
benefit of the oil and gas community.
Today’s new economy is all about multicompany
collaboration and this is most
appropriately supported through the efficient
use of the Internet. A number of hubs have
already been announced or launched with the
goal of providing collaborative business
opportunities to companies in the oil and gas
industry. However, these have mainly focused
on the buying and selling of parts and materials,
whereas the SAPMarkets & Commerce
One alliance takes this process one step further
and delivers a completely new set of
solutions enabling true collaboration for business
partners in the oil and gas industry.
Collaboration extends a company’s business
process beyond its internal operating
borders out to its business partners so that
both organisations can operate as one.
Collaboration improves industry-wide enterprise
performance, capital efficiency, productivity
and asset utilisation and reduces enterprise
transaction costs, inventory levels, cycle
times and data redundancy across the sector.
There was a time when a hub was simply
a common connection point for various
devices on a network. Today we talk about ecommerce
hubs as an intelligent platform,
which provides services for businesses of all
kinds to collaborate on the internet.
The alliance is part of SAP’s greater vision
for the energy sector. Such e-business solutions
as those already in place and envisaged
under the SAPMarkets & Commerce
One alliance will support processes along
the entire energy value chain. With its complete
solutions covering the whole value
chain from well-head to service stations,
SAP is in a unique position to respond to
the e-demands of the oil and gas sector.
In exploration and production, maintenance
technicians will be able to source and order
spare parts and required repair work. New
applications will enable operation technicians
to find suppliers and place orders for production
chemicals or instrumentation. Petroleum
companies can place bids for crude oil using
trading applications and negotiate and close
deals. Supply chain planning can be supported
on c-business hubs through the use of
Stock Projection Worksheets and Available to
Promise/Available to Receive functionality.
Independent service station operators can
access c-business applications to request
shipments of gasoline. Again deals can be
negotiated and concluded on the internet.
A large range of business scenarios can
either be covered today or are planned for
the near future, providing user-friendly ways
to improve business operations, adding value
throughout a company’s operating chain.
With e-procurement, companies can search
catalogues, create and then approve a requisition
as well as creating a purchase order
and automatic delivery to the supplier. The
supplier acknowledges receipt of the order,
while the end-user can track the order as
well as the goods. In auctions, the user is
able to buy and sell and find the price the
market is willing to pay. Additional value can
be created through the sale of excess materials
and the covering of shortages from
shared inventory.
Adding e-value
In plant maintenance, the e-value comes
from the ability to efficiently plan and execute
maintenance activities. Purchase orders are
created for maintenance items directly from
work orders while alternative suppliers can be
sourced for urgently needed materials. In
maintenance, collaboration becomes key as it
enables the enterprise to streamline its interaction
with the maintenance contractors.
Service orders can be triggered via the maintenance
order. Time and material consumed
are recorded by the contractor and shared
with the energy company as well as any activities
carried out. Maintenance histories for
equipment and facilities can now be
accessed and analysed by all parties involved.
In engineering, collaboration creates the possibility
to work in a single engineering environment
with other business partners, creating
value through direct access to all relevant
information in one place and enabling a project’s
status to be checked and updated constantly
via a secure data exchange.
SAPMarkets & Commerce One believe
that no other offering in the industry will be
able to match this joint solution. It will provide
seamless end-to-end e-business, compared
to other solutions that must combine
several distinct architectures. The joint offering
provides a design that facilitates integrated
applications. This, in turn, enables
fast-to-implement, easy-to-add and maintain
solutions providing the flexibility needed in
the new economy.
Sponsored Statement
For further information, please contact:
Peter Maier
Director Business Development
IBU Oil & Gas, Raw Materials and Mining
SAP AG
Neurotstrasse 16, D-69189 Walldorf
Tel: +49 06227 747474
Mail to: [email protected]
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