What if you could monitor your value chain for unforeseen supply and demand signals? Or reduce the data quality problems that lead to out-of-stocks, invoice deductions and manual interventions?

In general, businesses lack the end-to-end control over the transaction flow with their trading partners. When exception conditions are slow to surface, the negative results are exacerbated. Manual processes and multiple back-office systems also complicate the equation. Overall, the lack of visibility and process control lead to:

• Customer Service Inefficiencies – Companies can’t confidently make or keep delivery promises because they lack information about the real-time status of inbound or outbound orders and shipments.
• Excess Inventory – Without visibility into order and in-transit shipment status, companies hold costly buffer inventory to avoid stock-outs or production stops.
• Spiraling Transportation Costs – Merchandising managers and materials planners lack visibility into exception conditions that prevent or delay shipments. Often, by the time this information is tracked down, the only way to meet deadlines is to pay expedited shipment fees.
• Lack of Productivity for Logistics, Buyers and Accounts Payable Staff – Customer- and supplier-facing employees spend large amounts of time on phone calls, emails and faxes because they lack immediate visibility into business-process issues and events.

Benefits

GXS Trading Grid visibility solutions streamline operational activities and enable you to respond to potential interruptions to your supply chain before they become major issues. Analytics offer real business insight. They enable you to sense changes in your value chain and implement changes and find alternatives before a crisis can erupt. Benefits include:

• Lower Transportation Costs – Reduce the number of expedited freight shipments required, with real-time notification of ordering and delivery issues.
• Lower Inventory Costs – Reduce the amount of safety and cycle stock levels by having better insight into the performance of your trading partners.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction – Respond to incoming orders immediately upon receipt and easily monitor your own performance in meeting process requirements.
• Improved Internal Productivity – Reduce the costs associated with managing customer and supplier relationships by minimizing manual interactions. Drive efficiency in your supply-chain process through visibility into the performance trends of your trading community.

Features

Several Trading Grid applications proactively monitor your supply-chain activity with on-demand visibility into order, shipment and payment status. You establish your company’s profile and business rules. Using these rules, Trading Grid data and event processing enables a superior level of responsiveness to reduce the potential impact of unforeseen changes in supply or demand. Features include:

• User-Configurable Business Rules – Users can define rules for various events such as arrival of specified documents, document errors, automatic document forwarding and trading partner delinquency in responding to receipt of a document within a specified timeframe. Event Management Services monitor the process and automatically take user-defined actions when a particular event occurs.
• Centralized View of Operational Data – All data is routed to GXS Trading Grid, giving users a centralized view of data across their entire community. Operational staff can respond quickly when trading partners inquire about document status or content.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – Dashboards and reports provide users with intelligence about the performance of their supply chain.
• Rule-Based Alerting – Users can receive email or text message alerts based on predefined events. For example, an email alert can be triggered when an order has not been acknowledged or an order has arrived.

Optional capabilities include:

• Functional Acknowledgment (FA) Management Services – Hosted services that help you manage and monitor the performance of your supplier community. FA Management Services:
• Automate the manual tasks associated with the follow-up of delinquent trading partners
• Offer user-configurable definitions of performance rules and resultant actions
• Provide a centralized view of detailed operational data and dashboards that summarize community performance
• Offer supplier dashboards and rules-based alerts
• Exception Alerts – A hosted service that provides you with notifications via email or text messages as soon as specified exception conditions occur. Examples of alerts include:
• Document Arrival Alerts—when a document such as a Purchase Order has arrived in your mailbox
• Mailbox Error Alerts—if a document you sent failed to be processed
• Mailbox Inactivity Alerts—in the event that you don’t receive documents according to your predefined schedule.
• Autocopy and Autoforward – Allows you to automatically send a copy of your original document(s) to all the senders and/or receivers in your predefined distribution list.