I recently had the privilege and honor of training 12 incredibly bright, witty and motivated women entrepreneurs from South Africa on the fine art of developing a positioning statement and elevator speech for their high tech companies and incubators.  For those of you who have ever experienced this exercise, you’ll relate to the following statement written by one of the participants on her blog after my session, “Refining my elevator pitch was slightly traumatic, but so insightful. And having to say it ten million times today, was most certainly helpful.”

The training course was sponsored by Meridian International Center, in partnership with Maxum Business Incubator at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria, South Africa, and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Center for Women in Information Technology (CWIT).  The program is  a two-year program funded by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) Office of Citizen Exchanges. The goal of the project is to empower and train 12 current and aspiring South African women entrepreneurs to establish or grow their information and communications technology (ICT) business/business model or ICT-enabled business/business model.               

With the rise of globalization both for physical and human capital, these women were extremely interested in how GXS helps conduct business without being hindered by international boundaries.  We talked a lot about what makes B2B ecommerce tick and how to take advantage of human capital resources in other parts of the world while keeping productivity high.  I learned a lot about South Africa during my 3 hours with these ladies.  The most eye opening is that South Africa is a developing and up and coming region for global trade.  So much so,  manufacturers in many vertical industries should begin to take notice.  Here are some statistics:·         Since 1994, over US$1-billion has been spent on upgrading and modernizing South Africa’s textile, clothing and footwear industry, making it efficient and ready to compete internationally.  o   South Africa has trade agreements with the European Union and the United States whereby the country enjoys a 17.5% duty advantage. In the case of the US, textile exports have increased by 62% since the advent of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa). o   South Africa will soon also have preferential access to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, thanks to the SADC Free Trade Agreement, which will be in full operation in 2008. o   Other competitive advantages for the sector lie in competitive labor costs and the ready availability of natural fiber raw materials. o   South Africa produces in the region of 40,000 tons of cotton a year providing the potential for the local cotton pipeline to become increasingly export-oriented. o   South Africa has the raw materials needed to produce any type of footwear, from low end to high end. Bovine, ostrich, Nile crocodile, game leather, textile, PVC and PU synthetic raw materials can all be sourced locally without difficulty. South Africa is successfully growing and processing natural fibers such as flax and hemp, in response to increasing demand from the automotive and aeronautics industries for environmentally friendly body parts. South Africa is the world’s largest mohair producer and the fifth largest producer of wool. ·         Information and Communicationso   South Africa is the 20th largest consumer of IT products and services in the world. o   South Africa’s IT industry is characterized by technology leadership, particularly in the field of electronic banking services. South African companies are world leaders in pre-payment, revenue management and fraud prevention systems, and in the manufacture of set-top boxes, all exported successfully to the rest of the world. o   Electronics industry revenues in South Africa are growing at levels well above the ovarall GDP growth rate. o   South Africa’s information and communications and electronics sectors are expected to continue showing strong growth in the future, due key competitive advantages specific to the country and the continent. ·         Automotiveo   South Africa’s automotive industry is a global, turbo-charged engine for the manufacture and export of vehicles and components. o   With annual production of 535 000 vehicles in 2007, expected to rise to 630 000 in 2008, South Africa can be regarded as a minor contributor to global vehicle production, which reached 73-million units in 2007. o   The government has identified the automotive industry as a key growth sector, with the aim of increasing vehicle production to 1.2-million units by 2020, while significantly increasing local content at the same time. o   All of the major vehicle makers are represented in South Africa, as well as eight of the world’s top 10 auto component manufacturers and three of the four largest tire manufacturers. Many of the major multinational companies use South Africa to source components and assemble vehicles for both the local and overseas markets.

So to all my new “Brus” (meaning friends) from South Africa, good luck in contributing to a growing and promising economy! GXS will be here to help you when your companies go global!

Not that I want to share the “goings-on” of my personal life through a blog, but I thought my recent experience in the operating room (OR) was just a classic case of why B2B ecommerce is critical especially in the medical field dealing with life and death situations.  OK, maybe not life and death, but while you are on the operating table, the line between life and death gets pretty darn blurry. 

A few months ago, I was told by a gastroenterologist that I had gall stones.  “Gall stones?  What the hell are those and why do I have them?  I eat right, exercise regularly and try to keep stress to a minimum.  Well, the doctor told me that some people just get them, but women over 40 are twice as likely to get them than men (another great advantage of being a woman).  Regarding the age thing, let’s just leave that one alone, shall we? 

Anyway, I accepted my fate and was sure all I needed was some gross, disgusting tasting orange liquid that would magically make them go away and I would be on my way to recovery.  Needless to say the doctor laughed.  He then told me the only way to get rid of them forever was to remove my gall bladder.  Remove it? Don’t I need my gall bladder?  Apparently, the answer is no.  It is considered a “non-essential” organ. 

So, there I was on the operating table with my non-essential, non-functioning organ waiting for the happy stuff to be injected into my veins when I hear the surgeon ask one of the nurses, “did we replace the surgical knot pusher?”  The nurse replied, “no, the shipment didn’t arrive yet.”  As I was about to scream, “Get me off this table!”, it was too late.  I was in LaLa Land and those words were the last thing I heard until I woke up 1 hour later. 

Once I got my bearings, I asked the doctor about the missing surgical knot pusher.  I told him why I was asking (he was relieved I wasn’t an attorney) and he called the nurse and the office manager.  Apparently, when the office manager didn’t receive the knot pusher from supplier #1, she ordered another one from supplier #2 and cancelled #1’s order. Supplier #1 couldn’t locate the original knot pusher and suspected it was already on the truck.  So now several knot pushers are going to arrive at the Surgical Center’s door step and so will 2 invoices that will have to be reconciled with the back-office system.  In addition, I also found out that the office manager has had previous on-time order issues with supplier #1.  

Had this Surgery Center leveraged GXS’ supply chain visibility solutions it could be rest assured it could handle the complex demands of the medical device supply chain. Through integrated work flow processes via the web, the surgeons and device companies could collaborate around scheduled surgeries, orders, and shipments.  The Surgery Center would also have access to supplier scorecards that would enable it to negotiate better terms and count on predictable deliveries.   All this would result in faster inventory turns, lower error rates, shorter invoice and payment cycles and most of all,  less freaked out over 40 year old women on the operating table who know something about supply chain optimization! 

Let me go on record that the Surgical Center was not at all negligible using an older knot pusher.  But, what if that part was a more critical component?  Would I have been at more risk?  Would I have had to reschedule my surgery? I don’t dare think about it.  GXS spends much of its investment in improving the retail, automotive, high-tech and financial supply chains. As you can imagine, I have not been in favor of serving another vertical market - just ask our VP of Product Marketing what my opinion has been.  But, since my surgery, I think I’ve changed my tune a little bit.   I am now in favor of helping the healthcare/medical community achieve better supply chain visibility.  Actually, I see it as our obligation to save MANKIND! 

In business, sports and life you will always be successful  if you choose to take the “high” road.  In real life that means, “do the right thing and don’t sink to low behavior even if your enemies do”.  Now, I’m not going to get into detail because I am not a licensed social worker, but suffice it to say, it’s a good rule to live by.  I am however, going to talk about the other kind of “Hy” road and that is the road to  “Hybrid B2B Integration”.  Hybrid B2B integration is composed of a combination of B2B software and B2B services that companies use to do business with their external trading partners – for example, order to cash or procure-to-pay processes.  B2B services can be anything from SaaS based applications, on-demand B2B infrastructure platforms all the way to B2B Outsourcing, which can include daily business activity monitoring, trading partner on-boarding, round the clock support desk, and dedicated program management.   

The Hybrid model is a great way to control what you feel is mission critical and outsource what you feel is either too time consuming, expensive, or difficult to do yourself.  Hybrid also enables you to leverage existing IT investments such  as ERP and EAI implementations and extend them into the B2B supply chain utilizing new or improved IT capabilities offered by Outsourcing vendors.   For example, last year GXS introduced its advanced Trading Grid Integration module called the “Shared Message Gateway” (SMG).  SMG enables companies to choose from over 20 communications protocols and over 20 ERP adapters for seamless trading partner and back-office integration for a true multi-enterprise architecture. 

The hybrid model enables much greater efficiency in running mature enterprise applications while taking advantage of a new generation of Internet-based technology. A McKinsey Quarterly report stated,  “In the past, CIOs deployed their own self-contained application architectures on their own servers and storage systems. This old model is giving way to a hybrid application architecture that combines hosted functionality with in-house applications running on consolidated and virtualized commodity servers. We believe that this transformation will drive efficiencies across the full stack, from business processes to physical infrastructure, while increasing IT’s ability to meet new demands in a rapidly changing business environment. Hybrid not only frees up capital and achieves cost savings, but it enhances flexibility, streamlines installation and upgrades and companies don’t have to maintain special skills.” 

If you still aren’t a believer, Gartner published a research report stating that “although most companies will implement some of their own B2B infrastructure, most midsize-to large companies will take a hybrid approach by deploying and operating their own B2B infrastructure to directly connect to some external business partners, while leveraging an external service provider to manage at least some of their B2B infrastructure.” 

When you are evaluating your next generation B2B architecture and strategy and you are asking yourself, “should we outsource, or do it in house?”, don’t go insane by thinking it’s an all or nothing proposition.  The answer is, it is a combination of both.   Determine your core competency, your opportunity costs of doing it yourself, your budget and time requirements.  Then when you meet with B2B vendors ask, “are you more like McDonalds or Burger King?”  They will probably look at you funny.  Then ask it this way, “can I have it my way?”  If they say no,  tell them to take the highway!

A whole lot, that’s for sure.  They both enable a fast, easy, secure and reliable way to electronically connect with a community of people you do business with – secure and reliable being the operative words. For over a year, I’ve been getting these LinkedIn invitations from people I know and  I’ve ignored them thinking, “Ug, this is just another way for the beings of the world-wide web to get hold of my information and spam me until the point of insanity.   No way!”  But, then I got an invitation from someone I haven’t heard from in a really long time.  And that hooked me.  I introduced that person to someone in my network and now they are doing business together.  I was the secure vehicle by which a relationship was established.  How cool is that?  B2B ecommerce works the same way.  The problem is establishing secure relationships and keeping them current is very time consuming.  I mean, I am on the verge of alienating my husband, my kids and my dog because from the minute I get home to the minute I go to bed  I’m checking to see who I can “link” to, who changed jobs, and who wants to link to me.  Same thing holds true in B2B.  Not only is it time consuming, but companies, much like people, initially lack the understanding around the benefits of connecting electronically.  They need to be educated and on top of that, the mechanism to connect has to be affordable and easy.   I remember meeting with an EDI Manager of a leading high-tech manufacturer and he told me the biggest thing he loses sleep over is not being able to get all his trading partners connected and enabled.  If he could achieve 100% community participation his company would experience improved employee productivity and reduce supply chain and procurement costs.  He explained that the biggest barrier is helping his trading partners understand why it is worth their time and investment to do business electronically. When I told him about GXS’ mantra for our B2B Community Services, “no trading partner left behind” (btw, our SVP of Marketing still claims this was his brainchild and not President Bush’s), his eyes lit up.  He actually said to me, “GXS can contact my entire trading community, educate them on the value of connecting, manage my entire enablement effort, and provide trading partner technical assistance?  Where do I sign up?”   

Thanks to Wikipedia, the definition of FIFO is, “an acronym for First In, First Out, which describes the principle of a queue processing technique by ordering process by first-come, first-served (FCFS) behavior: what comes in first is handled first, what comes in next waits until the first is finished, etc.”  If you’re dealing with mission critical information such as supply chain data, FIFO would or could cost your business.  Supply chain information processing requires parallel processing managed in seconds or nano-seconds.  But, that’s not what this blog is really about.  I want to get into GIGO – thanks again to Wiki, “GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out, is a phrase used to call attention to the fact that computers, unlike humans, will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical of output.  In fact, the acronym has evolved into what some people now call, “Garbage In, Gospel Out”.   It is a sardonic comment on the tendency to put excessive trust in computerized data, on the propensity for individuals to blindly accept what the computer says. Because the data goes through the computer, we tend to believe it.”Is that the truth, or what?  The InsanIT of it!!  It’s not that we are naïve or anything.  Since the 1940’s, we all bought into the fact that computers are suppose to reduce errors, make us more productive, save cost, drive revenue, etc.  And for the most part they do.  But, we also have to remember that humans are still humans, and guess what?  We still do make mistakes.  We have to remember and accept that the information we input into our computer systems could still be inaccurate, or some might say, “dirty”.  Yuck!  Who wants to be known for having “dirty data” – especially when your data needs to be shared with your trading partners?  It’s like a computer virus that will then proliferate to your trading partner and your trading partners’ trading partner, and so on, and so on, and so on (I’m beginning to sound like that Breck shampoo commercial from the 70’s). 

One of our GXS Senior Product Managers,  Melanie Ligons, wrote a great blog on the value of data cleansing as it relates to product information (http://blogs.gxs.com/ligonsm/category/product-data-quality/).  She discusses that if you can exchange product information accurately and quickly and keep that information up to date over time, you can ensure that all of your downstream supply chain transactions will also be correct.  That is a great example of how “clean data” can contribute significantly to achieving supply chain efficiencies.  After all, your supply chain is only as good as the data you feed it.  But, it doesn’t stop there.  What about data accuracy as it relates to order status for a customer?  Or, paying the full invoice or just partial?  Or, is the shipment going to the correct address?  

Data quality is critical at every step in the supply chain.  But, trying to achieve that can be a daunting and expensive task. That is why GXS has focused much of its effort on building data quality & validation capabilities within its GXS Trading Grid B2B integration services platform so customers don’t have to.  Customers simply need to send their supply chain data once to GXS and GXS takes care of the rest - cleansing, translating, and sending it off to all trading partners – nice and clean!   No more GIGO here!  

For those of us that have been in the IT industry for a really long time (you decide what’s defined as a long time because I am not going to date myself), there’s one thing that we tech people always seem to forget (maybe due to short term memory loss) and that is….“technology  never goes away…which means  everything needs to interoperate. ”     Why do we keep thinking that the next greatest tech trend will replace things we’ve already done?  Remember when the Internet emerged and XML was going to replace EDI cheaply?  Or, how about legacy platforms that were going to be replaced by client/server?  Oh, I could on and on - lightweight vs. heavy client,  ASPs, SOA, SaaS.  Technology trends are like the next wave of fashion.  What’s hot this year, may not be hot in a year or two.  But, what’s different is that, unlike your  wardrobe, where you can give away last year’s trendy clothes to Goodwill,  you can’t do that with technology, or at least not easily and most of all not cheaply.  Plus, we can’t forget the millions of dollars of investment we put into our infrastructures and the years spent on ensuring our systems hum and are available around the clock.  So, what does that mean for us poor souls that have to ensure we continue to meet customer and trading partner demand in a secure way that is reliable, extensible, and maintainable (wow, lots of ables in that sentence!)  Because it is hard to anticipate how our systems will need to be changed so they can integrate and interact with new technology fashion trends, B2B integration solutions are the answer to guarantee  “everything interoperates” and new technology fashion trends can be adopted with ease.   When I meet with clients to talk to them about why they should outsource their B2B Ecommerce program, I start by saying (and I mean it sincerely), “why in the world would you want to do this yourself?”  It takes a lot of full time resources just to make sure that companies can interact with their trading partners without revamping their current systems, data and process.  The great news is that B2B Outsourcing solutions mediate the differences between trading partner requirements so companies can focus on more strategic IT projects that improve serving customers.  Actually, a lot of the benefits customer experience when they outsource was unveiled in the recent Stanford University research study concluding companies deploying B2B outsourcing solutions experience a return that is 245 percent greater than their annual investment and a 62 percent improvement in customer satisfaction. Conclusions from the study indicate that companies that outsource B2B programs benefit not only from improved customer satisfaction, but also from improved B2B technical capabilities, greater competitive differentiation, greater inventory visibility, increased system uptime and availability.  Now, new high tech fashion trends can come and go without the worry of having to plan for migration and upgrade projects just to stay connected.

 I hear several B complex vitamins  help improve short term memory loss.  Maybe we should all  try taking some!