White Papers
GXS offers whitepapers covering a broad range of B2B subjects. You can see the full list below and follow links to view or download the whitepapers.
Understanding Your Total Cost of Ownership for Managing B2B Operations
As a managed services company, GXS has a long history of unlocking measurable opportunities to manage and improve the ongoing complexities and costs of B2B e-commerce. In late 2007, GXS and Stanford’s Global Supply Chain Management Forum unveiled research indicating that competitive differentiation, trading partner satisfaction and return on investment were greatly enhanced when businesses offloaded difficult B2B e-commerce functions to professional service providers.
Following the research with Stanford University, GXS explored opportunities to further quantify the cash benefits of B2B outsourcing to an organisation. GXS partnered with Hobson & Company to develop a business case that quantifies B2B outsourcing and captures all direct and indirect costs.
Driving Business Value Through B2B Outsourcing
For many years, business process outsourcing (BPO) has been identified as a strategic trend for many industries. As an organisation exclusively focused on business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, GXS recognised a unique opportunity to address the substantial barriers and obstacles plaguing our customers’ ambitions to optimise their supply chain and better serve their customers. For much of this decade, we have committed ourselves to combine nearly 40 years of domain expertise and our global reach with significant investments in technology, capabilities and practices.
GXS explored opportunities to conduct a ground-breaking study on the business and technical benefits of global business-to-business e-commerce outsourcing.
Ensuring B2B and Supply Chain Continuity at Divestiture
There are numerous aspects of divestiture that can impact the success of the future operation and much, obviously, depends on how well integrated the various divisions are to the central organisation prior to separation. Companies with common customer information integrated ERP systems, historic records, or supply chains clearly face greater challenges than those run completely autonomously while managing their own IT and B2B relationships. In some cases, core IT or supply chain assets may be included in the divestiture. In other cases, the division is literally “cast adrift” and has to rapidly re-invent its basic operational functions.
AS2
The rapid growth of the Internet presents a huge opportunity for companies to be able to connect more easily and cheaply to both existing and new B2B partners—if they can find ways to share data securely over this very public network. A standard introduced in 2002, AS2 is addressing this need, bringing the traditional benefits of EDI to smaller companies with limited budgets and slashing the costs of online transactions for large companies.
Before you can begin using AS2, you need to make a number of choices—in conjunction with your trading partners—about how you will transact online. This paper takes you through these decisions and shows how to get online with AS2 effectively.
Orchestrating the Entertainment Supply Chain
How a Mature B2B Program Ensures Greater Supply Chain Success Today and Tomorrow in the Face of Digital Distribution and New Retailer Demands.
Today, physical distribution is the primary means of delivering most game, movie and music titles, but the entertainment industry trends indicate that these channels will shrink significantly. In the next five to seven years digital distribution will become the rule rather than the exception for delivery of entertainment titles. The challenge for entertainment companies is to meet today’s physical supply chain demands while not investing too much in expensive hardware and integration software that will have diminishing value as demand for physical goods decreases.
Beyond Point of Sale Data
If you were to ask supply chain executives what they think the most important technology in their supply chain is, you might get answers such as Enterprise Resource Planning; Supply Chain Planning; or the Transportation Management System. However, another, perhaps more accurate answer would be the cash register, or what those in the industry formally refer to as the “Point of Sale” system.
One reason for the importance of this technology would be that the POS represents the most critical function in a retailer’s supply chain—the checkout process. The cash register is the moment of truth at which the consumer has to commit to a purchase and offer tender in exchange for the goods.
Data Quality Management
Whether it’s booking transportation services with a carrier, tracking shipments inbound from a supplier, or communicating delivery status to a customer, the success of a company’s transportation and logistics initiatives is directly dependent upon the quality of its data. Without useable, high-quality data available at an affordable price, companies will not be able to achieve the supply chain gains they desire.
After reading this white paper, the reader should have a solid understanding of transportation and logistics data quality, and be able to confidently ask and answer key questions including: What is transportation and logistics data quality? Why is it important? Why is it challenging? How is it solved? What does it mean to your business?
The Private Label Supply Chain
Over the last two decades, United States private label and store brands have gained a larger part of the retail market. Private labels enjoyed strong positions in the apparel sector for decades, but recently private label has been growing in food, consumer packaged goods and specialty products as well. Private label has grown from approximately 10% for many sectors to as much as 40% today. During the same period, European private labels have been even more successful. In addition, some apparel and home furnishing retailers in both the US and Europe, along with grocery chains like Aldi, have seen nearly 100% of their sales coming from private label products.