Industry Studies

Focus on Poland:
B2B Integration Challenges Facing the Automotive Supplier Community

by Mark Morley, Industry marketing Director, GXS

In 2007 Poland was the second largest producer of cars in Eastern Europe, manufacturing nearly 700,000 vehicles. This represented nearly 23% of total car production across Eastern Europe. By 2012 Poland will see annual production rise to nearly 1,000,000 vehicles (source CSM Worldwide). Fiat, GM, VW and FSO are the main car manufacturers in Poland. In order to support their future expansion plans, the major automotive suppliers such as Valeo, Bosch and Henkel will have to restructure their business plans and improve their B2B infrastructures to ensure continued supply of parts to these manufacturers.

There are two main B2B trading requirements for automotive suppliers in Poland, firstly they need to be able to connect to the four main OEMs in Poland and secondly they need to be able to trade electronically with their trading partners located across the border in Slovakia. Slovakia is the main automotive manufacturing country in Eastern Europe, however many of the component and parts providers are actually based in Poland and other countries around Slovakia’s border. Most of the car manufacturers in Poland, having headquarters in Western Europe, have adopted Western best practices when implementing electronic B2B trading platforms.

According to a recent survey by the European Union, Poland has one of the lowest e-business adoption levels in Europe with only 20% of Polish companies using e-business for internal process improvement and only 5% using e-business for integrating external processes. The current benchmark in the EU for e-business adoption across internal and external business processes is Denmark with 63% and 24% respectively.

One of the main barriers to e-business adoption amongst automotive companies in Poland is the poor quality telecommunications infrastructure and the limited availability of high speed Internet connections. In fact, for those that have access to the Internet, there are more domestic users of broadband Internet services than business users. The EU is currently providing significant grants to Poland to improve their communications infrastructure and this will eventually entice more Western-based companies to establish a presence in the region.

In addition to the communications infrastructure, many Polish companies are struggling to understand how to actually go about implementing electronic trading platforms, let alone understand the various communication and document standards that are available. Several of these companies are quite content with using manual, paper-based, order processes but due to the influx of new Western automotive companies they are being forced to adopt new e-business working practices.

GXS, through their partner EDIson (based in Krakow), allows Polish-based automotive companies to trade electronically via one of the world’s largest B2B trading networks. When connected to GXS Trading Grid®, these companies have the opportunity to trade electronically, irrespective of which communications standard or document format that they may wish to use with nearly 35,000 trading partners around the world. GXS Trading Grid allows any company to work seamlessly across country borders and it helps develop a robust and fully integrated e-business platform that helps position companies for future growth.

About the Author

Mark Morley is an Industry Marketing Director at GXS.  In this role he oversees the Automotive and Manufacturing industry sectors. He has 15 years of experience in the Product Lifecycle Management space which has allowed him to work closely with Automotive OEMs and Tier1 suppliers.