COMMERCE CONNECT

To remain competitive, businesses are increasingly streamlining their business processes, outsourcing non-core activities, forming closer partnerships with key suppliers and offering a wide range of products and services to their customers.

To support these strategies, businesses need to give their suppliers and customers controlled access to their own internal applications through browsers and the web.

In order to reduce costs, there is a requirement to automate appropriate communications with customers and suppliers. This may be as simple as automatically sending an e-mail to a supplier when a product is out of stock, or as complex as a suppliers´ shipping application automatically sending despatch information to the customers´ receiving application.

commerce.connect is a series of Infor applications and associated services that are used by the suppliers and customers of companies using the System 21 product set.

commerce.connect includes a number of applications to support various sales channels. These include support for a direct sales force, order capture and enquiries through a call centre as well as web-based customer self-service applications. A number of .connect applications manage and measure the success of these channels.

Customer self-service also extends to equipment maintenance and servicing scenarios. Here, self-service applications allow customers to log equipment faults and request an engineer visit. Still with equipment servicing, mobile engineer solutions support communication between on-the- road engineers and the business processes back at base.

Advanced purchasing functions and supplier self-service applications exist to support the buying process and management of the supply chain.

Finally, application integration software eases the integration of both internal and external applications by providing communication and message translation services that combine with inter.connect business integration components and process.connect workflow services.

The .connect applications are: sales.connect, call.connect, web.connect, service.connect, commerce.platform, doc.connect, customer.connect, vendor.connect, buy.connect.