Hewlett-Packard (HP) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) will provide systems integration services to connect trading partners to Viacore's private online trading exchanges under agreements announced this week.
The arrangements are designed to make it less difficult for companies to build, connect to, and manage private trading exchanges. Viacore offers outsourced, customized private exchanges -- called business process networks -- that are designed to help companies improve supply-chain visibility, inventory management and planning, and forecasting capabilities. HP and PwC will provide packaged systems integration solutions to connect trading partners to Viacore's customised exchanges, said Fadi Chehade, Viacore's CEO.
"People are essentially looking to get deep, multi-tier visibility in their supply chains to manage demand," said Chehade, who was formerly CEO of the RosettaNet Inc. XML consortium.
Although many companies have invested heavily in supply-chain management software, they now need help managing the data that flows through these applications, he said.
"Most of these supply-chain applications depend on other people all over the world to feed them data," Chehade said. "There's a slew of possible exceptions and invalid things that can go on. Building business process networks that understand the content and monitor the content is critical for the success of true supply-chain applications."
Viacore's business process network solution is composed of an intelligent hub that routes documents and processes to and from trading partners, a feature to integrate and connect partners, and a command and control base that monitors documents and processes. Viacore's hosted solution is designed to handle all aspects of private trading exchange connectivity and management, including security, guaranteed delivery, alert management, and translation between protocols.