Solution Overview



Sainsbury’s Supermarkets recently launched a new supply chain initiative to provide tighter collaboration with suppliers, higher profits, and better customer service. The new Internet-based information-sharing and collaboration system, created with the help of Microsoft® Certified Solution Provider EQOS Systems, Ltd., can eventually allow all 4,000 of Sainsbury’s suppliers to work with buyers in planning, executing, and managing successful product promotions. The solution, the first retail system of its kind in the U.K. to be based on the Microsoft Value Chain Initiative, also has future potential for management and tracking of new product introductions, product returns, and product lifecycles.

The largest local government in the United States buys $650 million worth of goods and services each year from a list of 25,000 bidders—everything from hard drives to helicopters. Until recently, all of those purchases were made using paper forms. The time delays inherent in paperwork created chaos, waiting, and huge warehousing costs. With e-commerce heating up, L.A. County got online. Using a Web-based purchasing solution from solution provider Commerce One, the county now lets buyers shop, order and pay for goods over the NInternet. The benefits: big savings from easier comparison-shopping and lower inventory costs, faster order cycles, less paperwork, and more opportunities for small businesses.

Sainsbury’s, a leading United Kingdom grocery chain founded in 1869, opened its first store in Drury Lane, London, with the promise of “highest quality at keenest prices.” In 1998, with around 400 stores in the U.K., Ireland, and the United States, and total sales of 11.6 billion in pounds, Sainsbury’s is still bringing the best products and high service quality to an increasing number of consumers. In a market that is fiercely competitive, product promotions, customer loyalty, quality of produce, and availability all drive market share and position.

Special promotions account for a whopping 2 billion in pounds—or about 10 percent—of all Sainsbury’s sales. Such promotions range from a “buy one, get one free,” offer, to a discounted price, to a product tie-in offer, for example, the customer gets a free bag of potato chips with every six-pack of cola. Sainsbury’s runs about 2,000 promotions at any one time, involving billions of pounds worth of products, thousands of players, and an incredible array of logistical coordination. Despite this, the company had to manage the promotional planning process using a series of paper-driven systems that meant poor coordination, planning, and evaluation of promotions. “Promotions account for a large percentage of our sales, but we were running them without sufficient information,” explains John Rowe, Sainsbury’s Director of Logistics.

With the help of Microsoft Certified Solutions Provider EQOS Systems, Ltd., Sainsbury’s began streamlining this critical process. The chain built a Web-based supply chain planning and collaboration system that allows suppliers and buyers to work through every detail of a product promotion in advance and to track its success in real time. The solution was created in a matter of weeks using Microsoft electronic commerce technologies, such as Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition, Microsoft Windows NT® Server 4.0, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 6.5. As a result of this new application, Sainsbury’s is reducing the time spent in planning promotions and is eliminating the chance of running out of inventory. Sainsbury’s and its suppliers can deploy stock where needed, and increase promotion-related revenues.

Tripping Over a Complex Process

Sainsbury’s has worked diligently to satisfy customers, using criteria established by an initiative called Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) (). ECR aims to provide the retail consumer with the highest quality service through integrated partner collaboration, information-sharing, and efficient supply chain operations. In the area of product promotions, ECR estimates that $4 billion can be saved across Europe by linking stores and suppliers more efficiently.

Consider the complexity of the average supermarket promotion. Sainsbury’s might decide to offer a promotion on Nestlé coffees: buy one jar, get another jar free. Sounds simple. But, how does Sainsbury’s calculate how much extra coffee to have on hand? If everything goes right and the promotion is a big success, the chains sell more coffee and boost profits. However, if the promotion is a big success and Sainsbury’s orders too little coffee, then inventory runs out, customers are frustrated, and profits are limited. Conversely, if Sainsbury’s orders too much coffee and the promotion bombs, the chain is left with unsold merchandise. In the case of perishable items like bananas or yogurt, Sainsbury’s and the supplier takes a huge loss, because they can’t sell those items later.

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of promotions going on simultaneously with thousands of suppliers, and you have the makings of a colossal logistical nightmare. “We were barreling into the next promotion without understanding the impact of the last one,” Rowe says. “There are hundreds of people at Sainsbury’s and thousands of people in our supplier base involved in promotions—brand managers, product managers, line managers, event managers, advertising managers, and the list goes on. The time for planning a promotion can be very short—anywhere from a week for perishable items like fish or fruit to several months for other products. We needed a way to synchronize people and information to correctly estimate stock levels, keep customers happy, and reduce product waste.”

The Answer: Constant Communication with Suppliers

Rowe realized that Sainsbury’s needed far better, far more continuous communication with its suppliers. The company had moved from paper catalogs to electronic catalogs to a Web-based information service for suppliers. Now they needed to move to true online collaboration. Rowe says, “We saw the need for continuous information-sharing and joint decision-making.”

Sainsbury’s evaluated several off-the-shelf collaboration applications and chose one called EQOS Collaborator from Microsoft Certified Solutions Provider EQOS Systems. Co-founder and managing director at EQOS Systems, Mike Quinn, says, “We decided to develop EQOS Collaborator using Microsoft technologies, because this enabled us to deliver a high degree of collaborative functionality very quickly. The wide range of Microsoft tools and available skills in the market was also an important factor. In addition, EQOS’s vision of providing a unique collaborative software tool to enable supply chain integration is entirely consistent with the Value Chain Initiative. Working with Microsoft on VCI is enabling us to reach a wide base of companies who are looking toward innovative software solutions for their supply chain needs.”

EQOS Collaborator is a Web forms-based collaborative application development toolkit that Sainsbury’s has used to build a Collaborative Planning System (CPS). Sainsbury’s first application on CPS tackles the complex area of promotions planning, measurement, and evaluation. The system prompts individuals for information such as promotion type, promotion date, product being promoted, promotion pricing, promotion objectives, and so on. Some of this information is pulled automatically from legacy databases (such as product and forecasting), and some is entered in real time. For example, the Sainsbury’s buyer enters the product code, and Collaborator drops in the product name, the usual price, the usual sales forecast for that item, and the quantity of stock in that store and in Sainsbury’s warehouses.

After the basics are established, Collaborator arbitrates and manages a flow of planning information among Sainsbury’s and its suppliers. Sainsbury’s might prefer the promotion to be a three-for-one offer, while the supplier would rather offer a two-for-one offer. Collaborator acts as process manager so nothing is forgotten, and prompts for next steps through e-mail.

Once planning is complete, the system taps both Sainsbury’s and the supplier’s forecasting databases to see how they match up for that particular product promotion. Sometimes they’re miles apart. Collaborator doesn’t create a forecast but allows the two sides to share their forecasts and move them closer together. Sainsbury’s might send its coffee promotion forecast to Nestlé, and Nestlé might ask why they are forecasting such a big uplift. Sainsbury’s can tell them they are offering a chocolate promotion at the same time.

Collaborator also lets Sainsbury’s and suppliers look at actual inventories and decide what product to move where. For example, they may concur that they need to move 10,000 cases of cola from northern to southern England during a promotion, due to increased demand in that particular region.

Once the promotion is underway, EQOS Collaborator lets Sainsbury’s and its suppliers track its progress, in near-real time. “Most promotions last one to four weeks, but you can usually tell within 48 hours how a promotion is doing,” Rowe says. “That 48-hour sales information wasn’t usually available until months later. EQOS allows us to capture sales data and share it with suppliers as it’s coming in. This is a tremendous help to us in adjusting or discontinuing promotions. And it has huge ramifications for customer satisfaction.”

Effortless Links with Legacy Systems

The system is built on a Microsoft Windows NT Server platform, hosted by Microsoft Windows NT Server’s Internet Information Server and browsed by Microsoft Internet Explorer. Information is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database, and can be easily integrated into other legacy databases. Importantly, the EQOS system can be hosted on many servers, giving suppliers the ability to upload and download information to and from the system. EQOS Administrator, which is the main program for building and deploying applications, has been developed using Microsoft Visual Basic® development system. EQOS also has a Web-based version of Administrator that allows users to build and deploy their own collaborative applications. And the electronic commerce functionality, utilizing the dynamic data collected, is provided by Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition.

In the future, EQOS may build the Microsoft Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) technology into the solution. The CIP, a significant feature of Site Server 3.0, Commerce Edition, is a simple system for enabling application-to-application interchange of structured business information using the Internet, e-mail, or third-party EDI Virtual Added Networks (VANs). The CIP provides a standard method of sharing any type of business-critical data over any network among businesses.

EQOS Managing Director Mike Quinn says, “We’re employing very clever technology between trading partners, which doesn’t require either company to change their core systems. Rather, it pulls information from legacy databases. EQOS gives Sainsbury’s the opportunity to do new things without going back and recoding their old systems.”

Good News for Suppliers and Consumers

Sainsbury’s first rolled out EQOS Collaborator to its major suppliers and is working to offer it to all 4,000 suppliers. Nestlé embraced the collaboration system immediately. Tom McGuffog, Planning and Logistics Director at Nestlé UK, says, “Nestlé invests millions of pounds ensuring that our information systems are optimized to provide our customers, the retailers, with the best possible service. Internet-based systems like EQOS Collaborator gives us the opportunity to synchronize dynamic supply chain information with that of our customer. This helps to ensure that we both deliver the best possible service to our common customer: the consumer.”

He continues, “We believe this project with Sainsbury’s will deliver some very tangible benefits —improved communications leading to better on-shelf stock availability, and therefore to more cost-effective promotions. That is good news for our customers and consumers.”

Other leading suppliers using Sainsbury’s Collaborator include Proctor and Gamble, Heinz, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, Kelloggs, and Coca-Cola.

Britvic, the U.K. distributor for Pepsi and other leading soft drink brands, found within 48 hours that a Pepsi promotion was substantially outstripping forecast. Using Collaborator, the Sainsbury’s buyer and Britvic representative were able to track sales daily and increase production to meet demand. As a result, Sainsbury’s rescued the promotion from a potential stock-out catastrophe and had plenty of Pepsis on hand for thirsty customers.

In another situation, Oscar Meyer—in the U.K., a supplier of Sainsbury’s brand of ready-made meals such as lasagne and curries—used Collaborator to spot a looming shortage of its meals in Sainsbury’s stores during a promotion, and to also spot a huge supply languishing in a nearby warehouse. The Oscar Meyer supply chain team could direct warehoused meals immediately to Sainsbury’s stores, where customers devoured them. Collaborator’s intervention meant 300 cases of perishable meals were sold rather than left to spoil.

Rowe says, “With the EQOS system, we can circulate information and knowledge very quickly. Now that several of our suppliers have started to use it, there seems to be an increasing thirst for data that can improve decision-making. The good news for consumers is that they will get the product they want.”

Sainsbury’s can also place new lines of goods, as well as product promotions, in stores in a much shorter time. Quantities can be predicted and managed much more accurately, whereas before, there was difficulty in matching correct stock-to-demand ratios. Rowe says “Now we can co-manage forecasts with our suppliers, whereas previously we worked in isolation. Branded suppliers will have a far better idea about the impact of advertising, promotions they are running, and so on, so we can update our forecasts of their products on a continuous basis.”

Another hidden benefit that the customer may not see is the ability to pass on consumer comment to suppliers in a quick and efficient manner. Rowe says, “We will be able to pass on consumer dislikes, comments, and desire much more efficiently. Previously, the paperwork was a bit of a nightmare, and the feedback loop was complex. With Collaborator, we can now focus on responding to customers quickly.”

Give It Away—And Watch Use Grow

Significantly, Sainsbury’s is making the EQOS system available to suppliers free of charge, reiterating the company’s commitment to improving customer service and to the Value Chain Initiative. Rowe says, “Our supply chain is increasingly being organized in a virtual way. This brings huge benefits but relies on information support systems that are integrated across company boundaries. We see Microsoft’s vision of VCI as the motorway, a road on which we need to drive to get information moving around between companies.”

Sainsbury’s has given its top 25 suppliers licenses to EQOS Collaborator and will soon have its top 1,000 suppliers online. These suppliers are so happy with the system that many are recommending that their other customers use it as well.

And EQOS Collaborator is useful for far more than promotions. EQOS Systems has tailored versions of the solution for managing product introductions, product returns, delivery slot bookings, product lifecycles, and forecasting. Virtually any function that deals with coordination across a supply chain is fair game. Non-retail applications EQOS Systems is targeting include public administration, transportation, even finance.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web,

go to:



© 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Windows NT, and Visual Basic are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

1198

Concludes Quinn, “Sainsbury’s has taken an important lead in shaping collaborative information systems. There’s no limit to what can be done with co-managed and cross-functional collaboration. Microsoft’s underlying electronic commerce technologies are moving this whole industry ahead very quickly.” If Los Angeles County were a state, its population would make it the ninth largest in the United States. With 9 million people and an annual budget of $12 billion, L.A. County is massive, and running its hospitals, police and fire departments, jails, road operations, and myriad other services is an equally massive operation. L.A. County spends $650 million each year on an incredible array of goods and services: tortillas, road graders, helicopters, livestock, paper clips, pacemakers, artificial limbs, automobiles—and much more. That’s a lot of shopping. Until recently, all of it was purchased through catalogs and paper forms. It was almost impossible to compare prices when shopping because of the mind-boggling numbers of items and suppliers involved in even simple purchases. Twenty people might buy toner cartridges at one time, without knowing that a central warehouse already had hundreds in inventory. This meant the county missed out on opportunities for volume discounts and incurred unnecessary inventory costs, not to mention the delays of paper-based order fulfillment.

Like many other organizations trying to streamline operations and reduce procurement costs, L.A. County turned to the Internet. Software vendor and solution provider Commerce One, of Walnut Creek, California, helped the county create an online purchasing system called County Acquisition Management Information System (CAMIS). CAMIS is an implementation of Commerce One’s Commerce Chain Solution, a Web-based application built on Microsoft® Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition and other Microsoft BackOffice® family products. They also integrated CAMIS into the county’s enterprise resource planning system. CAMIS enables thousands of county employees to interactively search product lines from multiple suppliers, compare prices and check availability, place orders, and reconcile order exceptions dynamically—all through a single, easy-to-use, Web-based interface, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Retiring a Slow, Expensive Process

Not long ago, ordering anything from a squad car to a notebook initiated an excruciatingly slow, paper-intensive process. The county had a list of contractors but the contracts were all on paper. The only automation was a Microsoft Access database that provided only high-level information on the items covered on the contract. Orders were generated through various means depending on the department. This process could range from writing down the information on a slip of paper to entering the data and generating a subpurchase order with a typewriter or personal computer. Then there was the approval process, lengthened by the circulation of so much paper, followed by rekeying and more paperwork at the supplier, and someday, delivery.

“There was an unbelievable amount of paper involved,” explains Chrys Varnes, CAMIS project director. “The cycle times were overly long, impeding county workers’ ability to do their jobs and serve the community. It was error-prone, because there was so much re-keying of information all along the way. And, the paper-based system made it very difficult for us to manage expenses … we couldn’t produce report as to what we were spending or buying from whom.”

“Finally,” she continues, “our old paper-based purchasing system was unfriendly to small businesses. They couldn’t afford to compete for the county’s business because of inefficient systems requirements and because the paperwork was so burdensome. Many supplied only one or two items, which made it difficult for us to justify the overhead of adding them to our system. We almost had to deal with large bureaucracies like ourselves with an infrastructure for withstanding lots of paper and lengthy processes.”

A Scalable, Dependable E-Commerce Solution

With many suppliers offering Web-based buying sites, Varnes saw her solution on the horizon: build an electronic commerce purchasing system. But, she says, “We couldn’t just turn people loose to place orders over the Internet” because of authorization, supplier qualification, and security issues. The county evaluated a number of e-commerce solutions, using the following criteria:

Scalability—the solution needed to accommodate more than 10,000 desktops.

Easy, flexible supplier interoperability, so large companies could link their Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to the county, while small companies with nothing more than a PC and an Internet Service Provider could participate.

Ease of use.

Integration with ERP system.

Dependable, proven technology.

The county went with Commerce One, a software solutions provider of Walnut Creek, California. Commerce One’s Commerce Chain Web-based procurement application consists of two pieces: Commerce One BuySite, an application used by county employees, and Commerce One MarketSite, an extranet accessed by suppliers. Commerce Chain is specifically designed for Microsoft Windows NT® Server and takes advantage of Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition and its Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) feature, as well as Microsoft SQL Server™.

Now, with its Commerce One and Microsoft-based procurement system, L.A. County employees can surf through online catalogs rather than trying to locate the most current paper catalog, easily compare prices, and even check out supplier inventories to see who has supply on-hand. To find the item they want, employees can either enter a text string (such as executive desk) or use a tree-style drill-down (office equipment to furniture to desks). Employees have an electronic shopping cart; as they find items they need, they click to add them to the cart. When they’re finished shopping, the system approves routine purchases using rules built into the software, while special items get routed to managers for electronic approval. Orders are all electronic.

The whole CAMIS solution cost L.A. County around $2 million—less than a third of one percent of its purchasing costs each year. And, it implemented the system in just five months, a testament to the power of the Microsoft development platform.

Microsoft All the Way

One of the primary reasons the county selected Commerce One’s solution was its use of Microsoft technologies. “The county is a Microsoft shop all the way on the desktop and gradually in our line-of-business applications,” Varnes says. “It’s easy for our IT staff to understand the underpinnings of the procurement system because of its Microsoft foundation.”

Says Thomas Gonzales, co-founder and chief technology officer of Commerce One, “The Microsoft BackOffice platform is a perfect fit to the county’s needs, because it supplies the integration, performance, scalability, and reliability they need. It also gives them a seamless way to manage their supplier network and a standard framework for extending e-commerce activities.”

Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition is embedded in Commerce Chain, providing a cost-effective, open, standards-based solution for trading partner interaction and real-time information exchange. “The Commerce Interchange Pipeline feature of Site Server gives the county an easy, consistent way to manage suppliers across a common pipe,” Gonzales says. “From Commerce One’s perspective, the Microsoft platform gives us a powerful commerce engine that we can leverage while focusing our efforts on tailoring the application to L.A. County’s needs.”

The Commerce Chain BuySite software, accessed by county employees, is built around Microsoft’s COM (Component Object Model) (COM) and Active Server Pages (ASP) technologies. It also uses Windows NT Server’s built-in Web server, Internet Information Server, as well as Microsoft SQL Server version 6.5. Gonzales says that Microsoft technologies give the site maximum flexibility and performance. “We can deliver a high-performance Web application that allows us to meet our customers’ needs, especially when some degree of customization is required. No two businesses are alike. We need the flexibility to tweak our application without sacrificing standardization across desktops.”

The Commerce Chain MarketSite, accessed by suppliers, is noteworthy because it operates beyond the county’s firewall. Site Server Commerce Edition’s architecture enables Commerce One to commerce-enable a broad spectrum of suppliers and process a broad range of transactions using an open framework. It provides suppliers with all the tools they need to keep their catalogs up-to-date and to perform standard sales tasks like order placement, billing, and order tracking.

“What makes the MarketSite unique is how we use Commerce Interchange Pipeline for commerce transactions,” Gonzales says. “It allows us to offer both protocol and data format independence, which provides a great deal of flexibility for information exchange between trading partners. It can accommodate any of the new emerging e-commerce standards whether ANSI, OBI, EDIFACT or others. Microsoft tools let us architect for both performance and flexibility.”

Tight Integration with ERP Systems

L.A. County’s new mainframe-based ERP system is called AGPS (Advanced Government Purchasing System) (AGPS), a government-focused purchasing system from INFORMS of Montgomery, Alabama, which manages all purchasing and contracts activities. Commerce Chain integrates tightly with AGPS, as well as with supplier ERP and order management systems. County employees actually enter the Commerce Chain BuySite through AGPS. After shopping in BuySite, an AGPS requisition screen is automatically populated with BuySite data. AGPS then creates a purchase order and passes the P.O. information to Commerce Chain MarketSite, which links to the supplier’s back-office systems. A supplier’s internal order is created, supplier inventory is allocated, and a request to pick and ship from the supplier’s warehouse is generated. The supplier sends its internal order number and confirmation back to BuySite, so the county can manage and track order status. All communications between legacy systems, Windows NT-based servers, mainframe ERP systems and Commerce One e-commerce software take place automatically, in real time, with no rekeying, no manual direction, and no paperwork for the county.

Moving Away from a Warehouse Mentality

One of the first benefits of the new procurement system was a pocketful of cash: L.A. County was able to shut down its central warehouse, providing a one-time $20 million savings and ongoing savings of $6 million per year. The new procurement system allows county workers to see exactly what’s on the shelf in either the county’s or a supplier’s warehouse with a few mouse clicks.

“Warehouses are a ‘just in case’ mentality — you stockpile materials just in case you need them,” says Joan Ouderkirk, acting director of L.A. County’s Internal Services Department. “True just-in-time procurement means we have confidence in our systems to deliver goods when we need them, where we need them.” The county is hoping the new Web-based procurement system will get it completely out of the business of stockpiling goods so it can close 90 smaller warehouses, too.

The ability to compare prices is generating another big savings:; within some product categories, there are often savings of up to 5 percent that can be saved by comparison shopping. This competitive purchasing is saving millions of dollars a year.

The county also now has excellent management of its procurement process. Because everything is digital rather than paper-based, anyone can generate instant, easy reports on all the county’s procurement activities: what the county is buying, from whom the county buying it, what it costs by item, and much other information.

More Small-Business Involvement

One of the most important benefits of the new procurement system is the way it enables thousands of small businesses to do business with L.A. County. “As a government agency, we need to be an equal-opportunity employer,” Ouderkirk says. “Small businesses just didn’t have the opportunity to bid on county contracts before, because partnering with the county required a big investment. When we give business to small businesses, we employ more people and help the county economy.”

From the county’s perspective, small businesses can often provide better prices and better availability than large companies. Browser technology brings small businesses into the process, saving the county money and helping the greater Los Angeles County economy by involving more companies. A new small business Web site posts all county bids and contracts; previously, a small business had to go to all 37 county departments and hunt these bids out one by one.

Says Edna Bruce, director of the Office of Small Business in L.A. County, “We launched this site with a budget of less than $25,000 using Microsoft technology. In the first few months, we’ve gotten half a million hits, and thousands of small businesses have successfully become county suppliers.”

The county is now working to get more suppliers to link up to the Web-based procurement system. They’re also looking to automate even more activities between the county and suppliers to expand the global trading community. With the virtual marketplace provided by CAMIS, any company in the world can be an L.A. County supplier.

Delivering in the Age of Now

With county workers spending less time processing paperwork, they’re able to spend more time in value-added activities like training suppliers and administering contracts.

“Purchasing is no longer the bad guy, slowing things down,” says Ouderdirk. “The purchasing department can now be a hero to county workers, saving the day instead of holding people up. We’re living in the age of now, and CAMIS lets us deliver to that expectation.”

-----------------------

Solution Overview

Industry

GovernmentRetail

Scenario

Large retailer implements Web-based supply chain collaboration merce: - Corporate Purchasing

Microsoft Products

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01

Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0

Microsoft Site Server 3.0

Commerce Edition

Microsoft SQL Server 6.5

(upgrading to 7.0)

Microsoft Transaction Server 1.0

Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0

Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0

Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0

Microsoft SQL Server™ 6.5

Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition

Microsoft Windows NT® Server 4.0

Microsoft Internet Information Server

Active Server Pages technology

Microsoft Windows® 95

Microsoft Windows NT Workstation

Third-Party Products

EQOS Collaborator from EQOS

Systems, Ltd.

Commerce One Commerce Chain

INFORMS AGPS purchasing administration

software

VSAM mainframe database system

Hardware

Dual-processor Compaq ProLiant 2500

with with 128 MB RAM and five

Five 2.1-GB hard drives configured

as RAID 5 arrayApplication server: Dual-233 MHz Pentium II

processor or higher with 256 Mbytes of RAM and 2 Gbytes of disk storage.

Database server: Dual-233 MHz Pentium II

processor or higher with 256 Mbytes of RAM and 6 Gbytes of disk storage, RAID disk configuration.

Mainframe computer for purchasing

administration software

Microsoft Services

Technical Support

Partners

EQOS Systems, Ltd.

[pic]Commerce One

Informs

“We can deliver a high-performance Web application that allows us to meet our customers’ needs, especially when some degree of customization is required. No two businesses are alike. We need the flexibility to tweak our application without sacrificing standardization across desktops.”

Thomas Gonzales

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Commerce One

“We launched this site with a budget of less than $25,000 using Microsoft technology. In the first few months, we’ve gotten half a million hits, and thousands of small businesses have successfully become county suppliers.”

Edna Bruce

Director, Office of Small Business

L.A. County

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web,

go to:





© 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, BackOffice, Windows and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

1198

“The Microsoft BackOffice platform is a perfect fit to the county’s needs, because it supplies the integration, performance, scalability, and reliability they need. It also gives them a seamless way to manage their supplier network and a standard framework for extending e-commerce activities.”

Thomas Gonzales

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Commerce One

“There are hundreds of people at Sainsbury’s and thousands of people in our supplier base involved in promotions. The time for planning a promotion can be very short—anywhere from a week for perishable items like fish or fruit to several months for other products. We needed a way to synchronize people and information to correctly estimate stock levels, keep customers happy, and reduce product waste.”

John Rowe,

Director of Logistics,

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd.

“Most promotions last one to four weeks, but you can usually tell within 48 hours how a promotion is doing. That 48-hour sales information wasn’t usually available until months later. EQOS allows us to capture sales data and share it with suppliers as it’s coming in. This is a tremendous help to us in adjusting or discontinuing promotions. And it has huge ramifications for customer satisfaction.”

John Rowe,

Director of Logistics,

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd.

“Sainsbury’s has taken an important lead in shaping collaborative information systems. There’s no limit to what can be done with

co-managed and cross-functional collaboration. Microsoft’s underlying electronic commerce technologies are moving this whole industry ahead very quickly.”

Mike Quinn

Managing Director

EQOS Systems

-----------------------

[pic]

[pic]

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download