Companies will soon have the ability to connect electronically to any customer, supplier or other business partner in two hours or less, says C. Edward McVaney, founder and CEO of J.D. Edwards.
Speaking Tuesday at the Internet & E-Business Conference & Expo here, McVaney's keynote address focused on the Denver-based company's vision of "any-to-any" collaborative commerce.
With technology that J.D. Edwards plans to introduce in June, McVaney says companies will establish electronic connections "on the fly" as a means of automating business relationships, reducing costs, increasing revenue, enhancing customer loyalty and improving profits.
McVaney says the technology will be an elegant solution to the "elephant-sized" problem of e-commerce fragmentation.
Phase One of J.D. Edwards' rollout plan for any-to-any technology focuses on solutions for the high-tech and electronics industries. That will be followed by a focus on consumer and industrial market solutions.
McVaney says collaborative commerce extends well beyond technology, affecting company organization, culture, skill set, training and management.
"Technology is the starting point to accelerate the process, but successful collaborative commerce will belong to those companies whose management recognizes the holistic changes that must occur for a company to achieve true, lasting competitive advantage through e-commerce, the next phase of e-business," McVaney says.
With a dark economic cloud looming, competitive advantage, McVaney says "belongs to those companies that enjoy realtime communication with customers and suppliers, complete visibility across the supply network for all participants and a realtime ability to shift execution strategy to accommodate changes in supply and demand."
J.D. Edwards' collaborative commerce vision is built on the OneWorld XE enterprise and advanced planning software with any-to-any integration capabilities through extended process integration (XPI) technology. XPI uses a component-based message broker technology to integrate various enterprise applications and enables internal and B2B interoperability.
