Preparing B2B Suppliers' Product Data for E-Procurement and E-Marketplaces

Manufacturers and distributors have been selling online since the mid-1990s. These days it's not all that difficult to set up an e-commerce website for a B2B business. But that may not be enough.

Smaller companies may be willing to make purchases from your online store, but larger companies are installing specialized procurement software and are importing entire supplier catalogs. And to be included in electronic marketplaces, you'll need to send product data in specialized formats.

Your company may be too small to compete in those arenas or your product may be too specialized for that kind of sales exposure. You may not want to pay the commission required by e-marketplaces. But if your company's marketing plan involves getting into these markets, you need to re-evaluate how you are storing and using your product data, as well as your capability to receive electronic orders. In this article, we're focusing on particular product data issues, though some of the solutions also enable you to take electronic orders.

Getting B2B Product Data Formats

Unfortunately, no single product data standard has established itself yet. Each leading procurement system used by large corporations -- Ariba, Commerce One, Oracle, SAP AG, and Clarus -- employs its own preferred data formats.

Both Ariba and Commerce One use a process called "punch out" that allows buyers to access suppliers' e-commerce websites from within the procurement software to locate and order products. Ariba calls it "PunchOut," Commerce One terms it "Round Trip," and it is also known as "tap-out." However, data received via the punch out method may not be as complete as supplier catalogs stored within the procurement software.

Ideally, a manufacturer or distributor will prepare its product data in such a way that it can be easily mapped to a variety of data formats whenever there's a request to populate or update catalog data for a trading partner, that is, a customer or e-marketplace.

This essentially is a data-mapping task -- assigning one field in your product data structure to a corresponding field in the XML schema. Here are some of the data formats currently being used. I've also indicated the procurement software vendors that accept certain formats, and companies that translate data to those formats, though this list is incomplete.

Vendors and Catalog Management Products

To get your catalog data into shape to export to trading partners you can (1) outsource the project to a service bureau, or (2) purchase software to do the project in-house. Nearly all the software vendors I found are targeting Fortune 1000 companies except for SoftQuad and Enterworks. The lowest cost solution seems to be SoftQuad MarketAgility Express for $995. Unfortunately, since SoftQuad's acquisition by Corel in March 2002, they are not currently offering this product, though it's possible that it will be re-offered later in 2002. Other solutions start at $10,000 to $50,000 and up, since they come with consultation and customization to work with a company's legacy systems.

Cardonet Inc. offers customized enterprise solutions from $50,000 to $1 million. (www.cardonet.com)

Enterworks Catalog Builder begins at about $10,000. It creates output files in xCBL, cXML, CIF, CUP, EDI x12 832, Oracle OAG, Requisite eCX 2.0, and RosettaNet PIP 2A1. (www.enterworks.com/products/catalogBuilder.shtml)

Innovit Pty. Ltd. (www.innovit.com), Australia, offers iICE (Intelligent Catalogue Engine) with outputs in CIF, CUP, cXML, xCBL, ECX.

Newark Electronics outputs catalog data into a wide variety of formats, including CIF, CUP, CCF, EDI x12, cXML, xCBL, and OBI. (www.newark.com/services/eprocurement)

Microsoft BizTalk Server (www.microsoft.com/biztalk) is designed to integrate applications ($5,000 to $25,000). It can use adapters from a number of third-parties to translate from one format to another. iWay (www.iwaysoftware.com/products/microsoft/BizTalk.html) produces many adapters, including those to ebXML, OAG, cXML, xCBL, EDI ANSI x.12, and RosettaNet.

Peregrine Systems, Inc. offers data transformation to RosettaNet, XML, cXML, xCBL, BizTalk, UN/EDIFACT, and TRADACOMMS. Their TrustedLink product is designed for smaller companies to trade data with trading partners, both with EDI forms and data mapping to XML formats. (www.peregrine.com)

Poet Software Corp. eSupplierLink is a Java-based application that begins in the $50,000 range. It outputs in cXML, xCBL, BME-Cat, CIF, and CUP. (www.poet.com/US_ProductsServices_eSupplierLink_Body.html)

SoftQuad Software Ltd. MarketAgility Express is priced for small to medium sized companies. It allows imports from Microsoft Access and Excel files and maintenance of product data. It outputs in CIF and cXML formats (other formats planned). $995. This is the lowest cost solution I've found. (Not currently available.) (www.softquad.com/products/marketagilityExpress)

Trigo Technologies Inc. focuses on enterprise level companies. (www.trigo.com)

Velosel eChannel Manager outputs in cXML, xCBL, CIDX, OBI, EDI, OCI, CIF, and CUP. (www.velosel.com)

Other solutions exist from companies such as Oracle, IBM, and others.

Developers Tools

You may need to pay a developer to make data conversions for you to various flavors of XML. One resource is CFDEV.com's XML Parsing (www.cfdev.com/xml) with ColdFusion.