New Zealand telecomms company Clear Communications started out as an innovator and now renders New Zealand's most advanced intelligent fibre-optic network, providing secure and robust nationwide coverage. With explicit instructions from management to start "walking the talk", Peter Davies, general manager supply chain group, is driving e-commerce internally as hard and as fast as he can. Trouble is, he says, he keeps hitting stumbling blocks laid by suppliers who don't want to go down that path, are simply not ready for it, or can't understand what it is all about.
"The hardest thing we've found is that while we're driving ahead with all this, we're finding a hell of a lot of our suppliers are not e-ready at all and they don't really know how to get there. So half of what we're doing is helping our suppliers become e-enabled as well," Davies says. Clear went down the exchange/procurement/portal track before deciding to try something else. "Nothing has fitted. Nothing has really worked because of the cost involved," Davies says.
"What we're looking at now - and, in fact, we're in our third month of trialling and using it - is building a software platform: a little grey box thing. One side of it sits between us and all our suppliers, and what that does is maps all their various IT systems into our Oracle Financials - we use the whole Oracle suite of products here. The idea is that the suppliers download data into this little grey box.
"So the suppliers will supply their catalogue in electronic form and maintain their own catalogues. Every time there's an update they export it into our little grey box that remaps everything then downloads it into Oracle. So we have the latest, ‘you beaut' catalogue sitting on the system."
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