05.09.08

Making Your Business Free Throws

Posted to B2B Integrity by Bryan Larkin

When Kansas won the NCAA men’s basketball championship in April, it confirmed the tournament predictions of many basketball experts: Memphis wouldn’t and couldn’t win the championship because of their poor free throw shooting.  It just took Memphis to the last minute of regulation in the championship game to prove those prognosticators right.  Yes, up by 3 points with handful of seconds left, Memphis could have called time out and set up a defensive play designed to stop Kansas’ last second drive in regulation.  Yes, Memphis could have fouled Kansas and forced them to take the ball out – thus..

Read the rest of this entry »

05.08.08

Manufacturers Should Firewall their ERP

Posted to EDInomics by Keifers

This week is the annual SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida.  I didn’t make it to the show this year, but I thought I would offer some insights on ERP and its increasingly interdependent relationship with B2B e-commerce.   The ERP vendors have spent much of the past few years focused on rewriting their applications to support a services oriented architecture approach.  SAP has its Netweaver initiative and Oracle has Fusion.  However, one area I think the ERP vendors have underestimated is the need to redesign their applications to support the extensive level of outsourcing that is becoming predominant amongst..

Read the rest of this entry »

05.07.08

Feed SAP

Posted to B2B At Your Service by Patrick

This week GXS participated in SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual customer event. We debuted GXS Trading Grid for SAP (with official endorsement from SAP with SAP NetWeaver Certification). Our investments in SAP started accelerating about a year ago almost entirely at the request (actually the imploring) of many of our enterprise customers.

I was not certain what to expect from this event. Every year we build a marketing plan that spans events and tradeshows worldwide, primarily driven by geography (US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan, China, Australia, Korea and so on), by industries (retail, consumer goods, high-tech, automotive, financial services) and alongside..

Read the rest of this entry »

05.02.08

Analysing the Q1 North American Automotive Sales Numbers.....

Posted to Driving B2B by Mark Morley

Now this blog entry is not suppose to be a maths lesson!, I thought it was an opportune moment to review the performance of the North American automotive companies during Q1 and take a quick look at the external influencers that are impacting their recently released quarterly results.  So let’s take a look at the vehicle manufacturers first. 

The surprise of the last three months is Ford, they have somehow turned around their business to produce a $100 million profit last quarter.  Considering all the problems that Ford were experiencing just last year, this is dramatic turnaround for their..

Read the rest of this entry »

05.01.08

EDI and Darwin – How EDI survived the Internet Bubble and the rise of the BRICs

Posted to EDInomics by Keifers

Not only is EDI the dominant standard but it is use is growing more accepted, not less.  Microsoft recently added an EDI adaptor to its BizTalk Server 2006 product to make its integration platform more competitive in the B2B segment.  This may seem strange to those who view Microsoft as chief evangelist for XML and Web Services technologies.   

EDI adapted to the Internet  

Rewind the clock 10 years and you will recall that it was not just Microsoft, but countless marketplaces, exchanges and industry standards organizations each proclaiming themselves’ EDI killers.  Few technologies have..

Read the rest of this entry »