Accelis™

As you know, e-business is more than buying and selling products through .com web sites. e-Business can be applied to all of the major processes involved in bringing your products to market and supporting your customer base.

You can adopt e-business initiatives to establish market requirements, collaborate during concept design, publish and exchange product definitions on a virtual enterprise basis, and service your customer base.

These capabilities are particularly important in today's economy where product realization requires the participation of your entire extended enterprise. Your suppliers, business allies, and customers—as well as your enterprise's widely dispersed knowledge workers—have to collaborate in most, if not all, of your product life cycle processes.

But integrating supply chains for the purpose of product realization traditionally has been difficult. The complexity of your mission-critical applications—as well as the multiplicity of systems employed by your suppliers—has inhibited collaboration. Dissimilar technology, proprietary barriers, and dead-end integration strategies keep many companies from achieving their e-business objectives.

SDRC's answer for integrating your extended enterprise into your product life cycles is an e-business system called Accelis™

Accelis is a state-of-the-market e-business system that enables your enterprise, suppliers, business allies, and customers to collaborate during your product realization and support processes. Its underlying concepts are easy to understand and cost effective to implement.

You deploy a web-based server—with XML information mapping—to interlink product information dispersed across all of your supply chain's enterprise application systems. Once this is in place, knowledge users who employ web browsers can request unified views to multiple data items drawn from your supply chain's back-end systems. In addition, e-business applications can interrogate a common set of product information to make informed decisions at each and every stage in the product life cycle.

In technical terms, Accelis is an e-business system that excels at collaborative product commerce (CPC). Simply put, CPC is a web-based approach to information integration that provides supply chain participants with access to a common framework of product information.

Typically, companies adopt CPC to improve their marketplace agility and organizational productivity. This is especially important for: 1) product makers that provide highly complex products comprised of many outsourced parts and components, and 2) vendors that offer materials and services to multiple supply chains.

Both kinds of companies leverage CPC to enter the e-business arena. Product makers use CPC to establish recombinant supply chains (i.e., supply chains that can be rapidly formed to respond to rising business opportunities). Suppliers use CPC to offer parts, components, and services to as many product providers as possible.

To accomplish these objectives, supply-chain participants need to share and exchange product information that resides in their existing mission-critical application systems. Many companies want to use CPC to integrate this information in a web-based environment—if they can minimize the cost and expedite they can minimize the cost and expedite the schedules associated with deploying these projects.

SDRC, 2000 Eastman Drive, Milford, OH 45150-2789. Tel: 513-576-2400; Fax: 513-576-2135.