Managed Services MX: A B2B Outsourcing Service for Companies of All Sizes

Home > Products > Outsourcing > Managed Services MX

The ability to maintain a competitive edge in today’s economy is often driven by a company’s ability to match business to business (B2B) capabilities with business strategy. Traditionally, outsourcing has been adopted by large global corporations that need to reduce costs, expand into new regions around the world or simply implement the latest B2B technologies. As these large corporations restructure their businesses to meet new market demands, their trading partners also must re-evaluate their B2B requirements in order to retain business from their customers.

So how do companies of any size acquire the B2B e-commerce technologies and implement supply chain best practices that have traditionally been associated with the larger multi-national giants? More importantly, how do they:

Implement the latest B2B technologies without having an extensive EDI or B2B team of people to manage the infrastructure
Support customers with manufacturing plants located in other regions of the world
Ensure that suppliers can trade electronically

Companies of all sizes can now meet these business requirements with GXS Managed Services MX. Managed Services MX is a new B2B outsourcing solution that has been designed exclusively for companies seeking an affordable way to improve the management of their B2B infrastructure and trading partner relationships.

Adoption of B2B Outsourcing is Growing

The Global Supply Chain Management Forum at Stanford University recently conducted a research study¹ on the use of B2B outsourcing across a diverse range of industries. The research clearly showed that B2B outsourcing can provide a key competitive advantage.

Key findings from the research include:

Average 245% ROI—Companies surveyed averaged 245% ROI on their B2B outsourcing operations. In fact, 15% of survey respondents achieved 400% ROI.
Competitive Differentiation—Over half of the companies surveyed thought that B2B outsourcing gave them superior capabilities that differentiated their business from competitors in the marketplace.
Customer Satisfaction—Survey respondents reported an average 62% improvement in customer satisfaction. Benefits were achieved through improved responsiveness to customer requests, enhanced B2B technologies and global B2B support—all from B2B outsourcing.
B2B Technology Improvements—B2B outsourcing users reported an average 75% improvement in B2B technical capabilities, such as B2B standard and protocol support, system availability and global scale.

An Outsourced Solution Built on a Best in Class B2B Trading Platform

GXS Managed Services MX is a simple, rapid to deploy B2B e-commerce solution that reduces the total cost of ownership for B2B collaboration by integrating transactions, managing business processes and electronically connecting communities of partners and customers.

GXS Managed Services MX utilises the reach, security and stability of GXS Trading Grid®, one of the world’s largest B2B trading infrastructures. GXS Trading Grid is a highly available and secure network infrastructure built on the latest generation of servers and network technology. GXS Managed Services MX uses six core components, which are fully integrated to GXS Trading Grid. Roll over one of the boxes in the blue area below for more information on that core component.

Transaction Management—Secure, reliable exchange of electronic transactions with business partners around the globe. GXS supports a number of standard communication protocols including FTP & AS2 via Trading Grid Messaging Service (TGMS). The service also supports a number of document types including ANSI X12, EDIFACT and XML. An online capability is provided to keep track of transactions between trading partners.

Client Implementation—Determining appropriate document formats and a one-time setup process for connecting to trading partners. This process includes notifying trading partners, discovering trading partner technical capabilities and testing trading partner connections.

Mapping and Translation—All mapping and data translation services are hosted by the GXS Mapping Centre of Excellence. The centre manages all mapping requirements and ensures that map-related change management and issue resolution within a community of trading partners occurs as needed.

Systems Management—GXS performs all day-to-day management of the B2B infrastructure, including systems health monitoring, data backups, network management, systems administration, database management and application support.

Business Activity Monitoring—Provides 24x7 transaction and systems monitoring, proactive transmission error processing and customizable daily error reporting. GXS also provides message tracking, trading partner score carding, trading partner administration and proactive notification to trading partners of any changes to data formats, transaction sets and business rules.

Call Centre Client Support—Provides 24x7 support in 19 languages across both local and regional call centres.

GXS Managed Services MX Can Help Address Your Business Challenges

GXS Managed Services MX enables companies of any size to fulfill their customers’ B2B requirements by implementing or upgrading their B2B infrastructure to the same standard as that which is used by larger global corporations.

GXS Managed Services MX helps companies address B2B challenges driven by:

Company Restructuring—GXS Managed Services MX allows companies to continue providing B2B services following a period of company restructuring, merger, acquisition or divestiture activity.
ERP Projects—GXS Managed Services MX allows integration to back-office systems and is ideally suited for companies running SAP or Oracle-based ERP environments. GXS has established an ERP Centre of Excellence which has evolved through many years of providing ERP integration support to customers around the world. Through GXS Managed Services MX, GXS allows a company to unlock the valuable information that resides in other back-office systems and improve the way it shares information, both internally across departments and externally between trading partners.
Inefficient Manual Processes—GXS Managed Services MX allows a company to automate many manual business processes such as invoicing and sales forecasting. Automating these processes significantly reduces the amount of paperwork flowing around a company and ultimately helps to reduce a company’s carbon footprint.
Global Connectivity Requirements—GXS Managed Services MX is built on GXS Trading Grid, so companies will have access to a B2B platform that can connect to any trading partner around the world, no matter where they may be located. GXS has operations in over 19 countries around the world. As a result, GXS can support your supply chain operations in Asia Pacific, Europe, North and South America.
Trading Partner Onboarding—GXS Managed Services MX will help you improve the way in which you work with new trading partners, helping by reducing the time needed to get partners up to speed with new B2B technology and integrated within a company’s B2B infrastructure. For new customer projects, GXS Managed Services MX helps clients ensure that all partners are able to engage in projects as quickly as possible.
Legacy System Upgrade—GXS Managed Services MX allows a company to upgrade legacy and outdated IT infrastructures with a state of the art B2B platform. The outsourced environment shields users from the complexity of managing new connectivity options or document translation standards. GXS provides the ideal opportunity to employ new Software as a Service (SaaS) or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based B2B environments. These environments are easy to deploy to trading partners with minimal implementation time required and ensures that every trading partner is using an identical “version” of the B2B platform.

Why GXS Managed Services?

For the first time, companies of any size can access the B2B trading tools and support that have previously been available to only the largest multinational companies. GXS Managed Services MX also allows further functionality to be added to a company’s B2B infrastructure as their business needs change over time. GXS Managed Services MX offers these business benefits:

Affordable—Low and fixed cost pricing structure allows a company to effortlessly manage their IT infrastructure budgets over a longer period of time.
Fast Implementation—GXS has managed over 200 B2B Managed Services customers over the last 20 years—this extensive experience enables us to deliver fast and seamless customer implementations.
Easy Expansion Options—Provides an ideal foundation on which you can expand your B2B capabilities. As your company grows, your B2B infrastructure can grow with it.
Simple Configuration—Employs a number of pre-configured connectivity options allowing a company to conduct e-commerce with trading partners as soon as possible.
Seamless Integration—Integrates to popular back-office systems, including ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics. The integration capabilities ensure that trading partners can potentially access enterprise information, no matter where they are located in the world.
Best in Class B2B Platform—Hosted on a best in class, highly available B2B platform.
Easy Management—Managed by a best in class support environment which operates a full 24x7, “follow the sun” support model.
Improved Customer Satisfaction—Running an outsourced B2B infrastructure significantly improves relationships with a company’s trading partner community¹.