InformationWeek

"To be successful, our marketplace had to be a scalable site for buyers and sellers," combining procurement, an integrated catalog of materials, supply chain, inventory replenishment, transportation, CRM, and payment, all in a seamless manner, says Chris Renner, co-founder and chief operating officer of INC2inc. "An integrated software suite will help us do collaborative commerce, setting up business-process methodologies and associated workflow to ensure that orders are tracked, fulfilled, delivered, and billed across multiple buyers and suppliers."

It's a big challenge. INC2inc has a 150-step methodology and integration process to validate suppliers that want to participate on the exchange, and to set up supplier catalogs that have to be described with uniform characteristics. Further, the challenge involves an automated procurement and order-management process that needs to be integrated into suppliers' supply-chain and inventory-management systems. The software effort requires middleware or "software connectors" that are specific to the food and beverage industry and are capable of linking legacy forecasting and inventory systems. In addition, INC2inc needs to combine that with robust CRM tools that can handle online selling, marketing, and customer service over multimedia, voice, E-mail, wireless, or Web communications.

The company has done some basic work in catalog aggregation, but all the back-end work remains. INC2inc would have to scale its existing trading exchange infrastructure, which runs Ariba Buyer (previously, Tradex Technologies' Commerce Center) software on Windows NT. It also upgraded the forecasting and inventory-management system plus the central catalog repository in an Oracle8 database on the Sun Solaris Unix operating system. That involved internally developing the middleware connectors, and customizing third-party catalog aggregation software to sell two kinds of supplies-commodity items, such as cranberries, grains, and chemical preservatives, plus unique items and packaging. In addition, it has to create uniform descriptions of thousands of stock-keeping numbers and tie them with third-party logistics and transportation-management systems. Understandably, all this work would cost millions of dollars and take a minimum of nine months to build.

"What we needed was an industry resource planning system as opposed to the limited enterprise resource planning software, to be integrated with procurement and other pieces and within six months for competitive reasons," Renner says.

After almost a year of building its own architecture and considering other systems integrators such as EDS, Renner decided to outsource the entire project to Computer Sciences Corp. CSC has a track record of creating similar E-marketplaces, such as e-Steel and CheMatch, and jointly developed and integrated collaborative supply-chain planning and transportation-management functionalities with INC2inc's existing trading exchange and transaction platform.

Together, they will create an industry catalog and middleware to link suppliers' legacy systems. In addition, the two companies plan to license the integrated platform being built for INC2inc so that other marketplaces can get ready-made solutions.

The benefits are significant. The integrated platform will be ready in September, just three months after it was started, instead of nine months, giving INC2inc an advantage over its competitors, MaterialNet and ECFood. And although it will cost millions of dollars-INC2inc would not disclose the exact price-including an equity position in the marketplace for CSC, it's well worth it to Renner. "Everything is about speed to market," he says.

"Time to market is like oxygen for E-marketplaces, and they want complete solutions," says Extricity VP of marketing Dave Kope. Extricity is also working on adapters or software connectors that will link marketplaces together.