Integrating With Customers and Business Partners

The ability to integrate your business processes and systems with those of your trading partners can transform the way you generate, process, and use business information and manage partner-to-partner transactions. Benefits include increased efficiency, lowered transaction costs, access to new markets, faster payment, and better management of materials, personnel, inventory, and shipping. Companies that can accomplish all of these goals will acquire a major competitive advantage, no matter what business they are in.

New and emerging technologies dramatically simplify the task of tying together systems and applications regardless of the underlying platform or programming language. By providing a complete application framework for building, deploying, and running XML Web services and applications, companies can span the once unbridgeable gap between organizations. With Flatbox Internet Business Solutions, you’ll be able to share and syndicate product catalogs to trading partners and online communities around the globe, while also providing partners with efficient self-service buying over transaction-based Web sites. The results can be measured almost instantly on the bottom line in the form of more efficient operations, lower costs, and more profitable relationships with customers.

Flatbox Internet Business Solutions will change the way you conduct business with your partners and customers, and deliver significant ROI in the process:

Business-to-business commerce:

Flexible order processing, high-precision currency conversion, multiple shipment handling, and complex discounting will enable your company to meet the purchasing requirements of any organization. Sophisticated catalog creation and management tools allow you to easily create market-specific or customer-specific catalogs that span products from multiple vendors, offer custom pricing, and can be viewed by customers directly from your site or exported for distribution. Native support for XML and other key industry-standard protocols simplifies data exchange, and reduces the time and cost required to implement integrated product and order exchange with business partners, customers, and communities. XML-based validation and import/export dramatically reduces the complexity of creating sophisticated, flexible catalogs that can be used across systems.

Portals:

Comprehensive content management, personalization, document management and search capabilities, coupled with sophisticated authentication and application integration features open the door to collaborative partner portals that deliver information tailored to the needs of specific business customers, partners, and industry segments.

Closer relationships with business partners:

Price is not the only thing customers consider when they weigh your products against those of your competition: quality, service, support, and transaction costs are all critical considerations that can tip the balance in your company’s favor—or against it. Flatbox Internet Business Solutions enable you to meet the needs of your business partners with greater efficiency and speed, and at a lower cost, providing an important tool in the quest to foster closer relationships and increase switching costs, both of which deliver important competitive advantages.

Streamlined operations:

Although the information revolution was supposed to bring about the realization of the longed-for paperless office, most companies have seen an explosion in paperwork. Flatbox Internet Business Solutions make it easy to integrate with your partners’ internal buying systems and allow them to make purchases electronically, freeing your employees from the paperwork burdens that come with taking orders by fax or over the phone. Automated order entry can also streamline the flow of data from sales through manufacturing, speeding production processes, improving inventory management and forecasting, compressing delivery times, shortening inventory cycles, and reducing the overall cost of sales.

Lowered transaction costs:

Integrated electronic selling can sharply lower the cost of every transaction that takes place between you and your business partners. Automating processes for handling purchase orders, creating and sending invoices, receiving payment notifications, and generating and sending receipts reduces employee involvement dramatically. Flatbox Internet Business Solutions can also eliminate the errors that plague manual order-entry and drive up transaction costs. And by streamlining the delivery of pre-sales product information and post-sales support, organizations can lower both cost of sales and customer support costs.