| Site Map  | Contact Us  

Dissecting the buying and selling process

In business to business trading, the idea of a one-off market transaction is not a good reflection of what actually happens in the real world. Most suppliers are themselves buyers and most buyers are themselves suppliers. Each participant in the supply chain adds value either by amending the product or adding to the service offered.

As always in business, inefficient buying, non-competitive practices, lack of knowledge, cosy and costly relationships, and other factors can increase overheads in the supply chain and prevent best competitive advantage being gained.

Electronic solutions are rapidly being adopted to make supply chains more efficient. MAINHighway has the skills to help your organisation capture the benefits of these new methods, honing the market transactions for efficient procurement practices.

Our approach is to disaggregate supply chains into their purchase and sales elements, identifying each micro-market transaction where buyer/supplier knowledge (and interests) combine to clear purchases and sales at an agreed price. Through this analysis we are able to identify areas where e-business technology can be adopted to drive overhead out of the supply chain and increase its efficiency in achieving your business goals.

MAINHighway points the way with PurchasePoint and SupplyPoint

A full description of these key solutions is available from us direct, but the following summary may be helpful.

PurchasePoint provides your business with the capability of creating an on-line e-procurement suite administered by your Purchasing Management team. Supplier choice and availability of catalogued items are configured to your specification. Purchasing permissions are user-specific with full audit and logging of history for budget tracking and authority checks.

PurchasePoint allows both open user group and restricted group access for both intra-corporate purchasing and/or intra-community bulk purchasing applications.

PurchasePoint allows inventory tracking for capacity planning and includes linkage to back office systems for rapid handling of shipping, invoicing and re-supply.

PurchasePoint is integrated with a management suite PurchasePoint Manager which allows your corporate Planning Management team to generate the master configuration of an entire Supply Chain process handling package supported MAINHighway e-business technology.

SupplyPoint builds your configured purchasing preferences into a user-accessible catalogue. This includes built in permissions based on logged-in user sessions.

SupplyPoint allows price differentiation for open user applications or for intra-corporate cross-charging systems.

SupplyPoint can be configured to allow your company or community to handle the core suite permissions and prices while still enabling out-sourced suppliers to have their supply inventory catalogued. Out-house supply delivery and availability factors can also be integrated into the core suite for monitoring and efficient treasury/cash flow handling.

Beyond the linear supply chain:

In complex industries, the idea of a "chain" is inadequate to describe the constellation of supplier/buyer relationships. These complex multi-vendor multi-buyer trading environments have to be captured in what are known as "market hubs". PurchasePoint and SupplyPoint together create the capability of implementing a market hub for both open market trading or intra-corporate markets (or even a hybrid combining open and closed markets as defined by the market administrator).

PurchasePoint and SupplyPoint are available as a MAINHighway server hosted service or as a complete hardware and software CommerceServer solution for companies wishing to use their own in-house server.

Solutions in partnership:
Main Highway is always seeking new opportunities. Adopting our supply chain solutions is a major step forward in capturing the potential benefits of e-business.

Prior to any implementation we will perform a full business process, internal and external marketing, commercial and competitive analysis as part of our investigations. In this we are supported by our supply chain consultancy partners - LCP Consulting - the leading independent supply chain consultancy.

We are willing to work as an "arms length" technology provider, a partner with a revenue share and as equity partners. Each project is considered on its commercial merits

If you need to examine your management of supply chain processes, and believe there may be benefits gained from e-business methods, contact us. It is useful to have a short executive summary of your idea at an early stage. Our experience could save you a lot of time and effort. Contact us now.

Home

e-business in the
supply chain

Key action markers we perform with you:

Disaggregation of purchasing decisions.

Examination of buying decisions and criticality of price, delivery and availability.

Buyer-knowledge analysis to identify whether supply is monitored or historic.

Contract price analysis, scope for change.

Inventory requirements, capacity analysis.

Treasury Handling, process and efficiency. Scope for change.

Planning methodology

Key action markers we do for you:

Scoping of requirement

Phasing of implementation

Development of System Suite

Support training

Technical back-up