Manufacturing

Manufacturers need to be able to connect with trading partners anywhere in the world using the most appropriate communication and document standards. GXS offers manufacturing companies mediation between any communication protocol or document standard, and:

• Support for industry specific standards such as OFTP2 and RosettaNet
• Interconnections to regional automotive networks such as ANX, ENX and JNX
• Local support in all major manufacturing centres, eg Europe, North America, Brazil, China, Japan and South Korea

Globalisation in manufacturing has led to numerous ERP instances being deployed at plants around the world. With the increased demand for one view of enterprise information, one of the most common projects being undertaken now is the consolidation of ERP instances onto a single instance. ERP consolidation is a good time to review your B2B integration capabilities and GXS can help by:

• Ensuring that ERP projects remain on time and on budget through the use of scalable resources and knowledge gained by hundreds of previous ERP/B2B integration projects
• Reducing the risk of connectivity loss impacting production operations by hosting your ERP/B2B integration platform in our highly available B2B environment
• Establishing a ‘Firewall’ around your ERP applications, ensuring that only clean, accurate data enters the ERP system and downstream business and production systems

Continued expansion into emerging markets has meant that manufacturing companies need to be ever more flexible in supporting IT and production systems in remote locations. Suppliers and customers need to be on-boarded quickly with an understanding of, and sensitivity to, budgets, resources and experience levels in emerging markets. Many of the smaller trading partners in these regions will have limited, if any, B2B integration skills to draw upon. GXS offers a number of community enablement and management tools which help manufacturing companies to:

• On-board suppliers and establish a manufacturing presence in a new region in a much shorter time frame
• Improve the overall response times from trading partners and encourage greater participation in B2B-related processes
• Increase collaboration amongst a trading partner community, thus helping to increase the efficiency of supply chain operations

As manufacturing has become distributed around the world, there is a growing need to improve the ways in which spare parts and high value finished goods are tracked to their final delivery destination. Tracking shipments in order to gain visibility to expected arrival times and actual inventory levels can be difficult to achieve without having high levels of connectivity to logistics partners in place. GXS provides full end-to-end visibility, helping to foster customer/supplier integration and collaboration, with hosted solutions that offer:

• Full end-to-end visibility of transactions across parts suppliers, logistics providers and border control agencies
• A single portal to view the status and location of shipments from multiple carriers across multiple modes of transport
• A pre-configured network of transportation carriers and third party logistics providers without the need for on-boarding

Manufacturers process millions of invoices every year. In addition to processing high volumes of invoices, manufacturers have to ensure that they comply with the country-specific regulations that exist around the world. For example, some countries require invoices to be digitally signed and data archiving requirements vary depending on the country and across the member countries of the European Union. There are a similar number of tax laws that have to be complied with as well. GXS provides full e-invoicing services that enable companies to:

• Electronically exchange invoice-related documents with trading partners including straight-through processing to your accounting system
• Quickly and easily on-board suppliers in the knowledge that the closer you get to 100% supplier participation, the greater your return
• Easily comply with country-specific regulations for e-invoicing while addressing common data quality challenge