As a rapidly growing company, Cisco® needed ways to automate interactions with its largest sales channel partners, manufacturing partners, parts suppliers, and logistics providers. Historically, these interactions were conducted through manual data exchanges and processes, which varied widely according to the systems used by Cisco and its partners.
None of the manual processes could scale as Cisco received more orders, added more products, and authorized more partners and suppliers. For Cisco’s largest partners, the high volumes of transactions and data also created substantial costs and operational burden.
“Cisco wanted to be a leader among corporations in the drive to conduct business electronically, and we also wanted to make it easy and economical for partners to conduct business with the company,” says Kris Cowles, Director of Enterprise B2B at Cisco.
The Cisco Business-to-Business (B2B) Operations group began to determine which processes could be automated throughout the product order and service cycle. Today, the Cisco B2B Operations group has created standard processes that enable:
- Automated sales orders. Cisco channel partners can submit product orders automatically over an industry standard, XML-based link between the Cisco and partner sales systems and automatically receive pricing, catalog, and order status data from Cisco.
- Manufacturing and shipment logistics. Connects Cisco’s contract manufacturing and logistics providers for fulfilling product orders, managing current inventories, and forecasting manufacturing needs.
- Spare parts tracking: Tracks parts inventories and sends orders to spare-part depots.
- Service dispatch: Sends service orders to Cisco’s third-party maintenance providers, which dispatch technicians to customer locations for making onsite repairs.
- Finance: Automates delivery of Cisco sales invoices for faster reconciliation and approval.
Cisco’s efforts for B2B integration have been highly successful. As of late 2007, 65 partners used B2B integration for sales integration alone, submitting 96,000 sales orders per quarter (39 percent of the total) to Cisco via automated processes and links between systems.
With B2B integration, Cisco and its partners are also able to reduce costs for routine transactions, increase employee productivity, improve the integrity of exchanged data, and strengthen partner relationships.
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