Web Hosting

Eqos's valuable engagement-based experiences discussed in the

previous part of this series (please see One Vendor's Quest to Garner

a Global Sourcing Ecosystem) were parlayed into the 2006 launch of

Eqos 3.0 and the more recent launch of Eqos 4.0 in May 2007. Eqos's

Web-based applications help retailers streamline and scale their

sourcing operations by allowing every member in the supply

chain—whether located in Boston (US), Pretoria (South Africa), or

Beijing (China)—to collaborate online and access the most up-to-date

information on the sourcing process of consumer goods.

Based on best practices learned through its work with such retailers

as Best Buy and Tesco, the updated Eqos product enables retailers to

manage the sourcing process of goods, from initial concept and design

through to product specification, bid management and assessment,

landed costs estimation, packaging, sampling, testing, and final

order confirmation.

Hosted by Eqos (www.eqos.com), the solution includes critical path

management, workflow management, reporting analytics, and an

alerts-and-exceptions function. Pertinent information, including

product images, can be entered into a master repository, which

reduces duplication and errors, and provides a single view of the

supply pipeline—accessible to approved internal or external users.

The solution, which also enables the monitoring of suppliers from a

quality compliance and risk management perspective, has continually

improved its intuitiveness. It now allows all levels of designers,

technicians, and buyers, as well as supplier personnel, to easily

track the sourcing process.

Another major breakthrough for Eqos came mid-2006, when Edgars

Consolidated Stores Limited (Edcon), the leading retail group in

South Africa for clothing, footwear, and textiles, selected the

vendor's global sourcing solution to improve supplier collaboration,

support the expansion of its retail supply chain, deliver the latest

fashions to consumers faster, and boost bottom line profitability.

The solution has since been implemented by a joint Eqos and Accenture

team working closely with the Edcon merchants.

Operating in Johannesburg as Edgars Department Store since 1929,

Edcon today offers ten retail brands: Edgars (offering clothing,

footwear, kitchenware, household textiles, and housewares), Jet

(clothing and footwear), C N A (books, stationery, and music), Red

Square (cosmetics), Boardmans (housewares, household textiles, and

kitchenware), Legit (young women's fashion), Jet Shoes (footwear),

Temptations (intimate wear), Prato (footwear), and JetMart (general

merchandise such as clothing, kitchenware, music, do-it-yourself

(DIY) items, small electrical appliances, household textiles, health

and beauty products, and stationery). Grouped within the Edcon

department stores and discount divisions, the above brands cover

multiple categories throughout the approximate 1,000 stores located

across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Lesotho.

Eqos Today

Consequently, Eqos is currently supporting some of the world's

leading retailers by hosting their near 15,000 users (which include

retailers, agents, suppliers, and other trading partners) in over 55

countries. Eqos is a professionally managed and growing organization

of about 70 employees, and the vendor has been consistently

profitable, with quarter over quarter growth. It has recently

experienced physical expansion, opening offices in Boston,

Massachusetts (US) in early 2006, and in Hong Kong, China in early

2007. This latest investment has signaled the company's commitment to

supporting more fully customers' sourcing operations in Asia.

Eqos's global expansion comes as more retailers establish sourcing

offices and strengthen relationships with agents and strategic

suppliers throughout Asia. The company's Hong Kong office provides

retailers and their trading partners with Mandarin, Chinese, and

English language support across numerous time zones and geographical

regions. Eqos supports more than 4,000 users in China alone. On a

global basis, the company manages more than 5,000 transactions a day

and 100,000 user logins per month, thereby supporting the management

of nearly 38 billion dollars (USD) worth of inventory annually.

The most recent US customer win took place in April 2007; retailer

H.E. Butt Grocery Company (H-E-B) selected Eqos's business solutions

to support and expand its global sourcing and supplier management

operations, as well as to enhance its private label offerings by

improving supply chain collaboration and visibility. H-E-B opened its

first store in 1905 in Kerrville, Texas (US), and today is one of the

nation's largest independently owned retailers, serving a broad range

of customers. With more than 300 stores in Texas and Mexico, the

supermarket chain earns revenues in excess of 12 billion dollars

(USD). Now based in San Antonio, Texas, H-E-B employs more than

60,000 partners and serves millions of customers in over 150

communities. Known as an IT innovator, the retailer claims to have

consistently outpaced its competitors by offering differentiated

products and services through a variety of formats.

Another trend that has played a key role in Eqos's success is that

retailers are increasingly implementing private label strategies to

help grow their revenues. As reported in The Promise (and

Complexities) of Private Labels (and given the recurring private

label theme thus far in this article), there is clearly a growing

trend among retailers toward offering private (or the retailer's own)

labels and brands. Consequently, a fundamental reassessment of the

structure of global sourcing has occurred; companies are now

reconsidering whether they need agents or other middlemen at all,

since more and more, companies can now work directly with

manufacturers via Internet trading exchanges. Given some reported

success with lower-priced house brands, retailers in several

segments, including fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), consumer

electronics, and apparel, are increasing their focus on private label

merchandise (which is typically imported) to take advantage of margin

improvements, improved quality consistency, and brand loyalty.

For instance, retailer Best Buy realized that it could not compete

with the likes of Sony and Panasonic in high-end, premium electronics

equipment, appliances, and computers because of these two brands'

loyal customer bases. However, Best Buy also realized that no such

customer loyalty exists for accessory items. Therefore, the retailer

has come up with its own line of competitively priced cable products,

as well as other peripherals, such as external drives, USB ports,

keyboards, etc. The retailer has also found a niche market receptive

to private label TV sets and consumer electronics, at the low and

mid-range price points.

Eqos's Current Mission Enabled by a Service-oriented Architecture

Platform

Eqos's current mission is to become the leading provider of global

sourcing and supplier management solutions for the retail supply

chain worldwide, empowering sourcing and procurement executives and

clerks to improve time to market, increase customer value, improve

margins, decrease operating costs, and scale private label business.

In other words, the idea is to enable customers to increase their

span of control over their global supply bases, thereby driving

competitive advantage and promoting collaborative product and

supplier innovation. This is to be achieved by simplifying,

standardizing, and scaling the processes associated with the sourcing

of private label merchandise across the entire supplier network, by

working collaboratively with suppliers. These processes span from the

initial product concept through to production and delivery to the

retailer's distribution centers (and in some cases, into the

after-sale phases).

In addition to software and support, Eqos offers hosting support,

user community management, and applications management services.

These offerings stem from Eqos's acknowledgement that over time,

companies have invested in technology to support their business and

supply chain processes. The desire of companies to protect their

investments must be balanced with the agility and speed that the

market is demanding. This means that newly acquired capabilities must

complement existing IT environments in a way that seamlessly

integrates information and processes across both old and new systems.

The idea (if not an imperative) is to leverage retailers' legacy

enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM)

applications to build forward-thinking cross-enterprise processes

that promote collaboration between retailers and their suppliers,

buying offices, and other trading partners.

Logically, global sourcing and supplier relationship management (SRM)

demand control of enterprise processes and close collaboration with

suppliers (all of which may have very different systems or levels of

IT expertise). Thus, managing the extensive and diverse retail supply

chain requires a simple approach to workflow and project management

that is supported by network-wide collaboration.

The Eqos Collaboration Platform is built on service-oriented

architecture (SOA) given the closeness of the peer-to-peer (P2P) and

SOA concepts, and underpins the entire Eqos solution suite with a

flexible architecture that can adapt to rapidly changing business

needs and IT landscapes. The application addresses global sourcing,

product lifecycle management, and supplier management business flows.

It not only streamlines integration with trading partners, but also

handles internal integration using flexible extensible markup

language (XML)-based servers.

Early in 2006, Eqos announced the launch of its new platform release,

Eqos Platform 7, which was primarily an "architectural" release with

the following three principal areas of advanced development:

1. A technology move to Microsoft.NET technologies and Microsoft

SQL Server 2005 database to provide better performance. Solution

developers can use these well-known and widespread technologies to

extend the core capabilities of the Eqos solution.

2. Further performance enhancements through a more flexible data

schema. This new approach has addressed the needs of customers that

are embedding collaborative solutions more deeply into their business

and increasing the traffic through them, by providing easier

navigation and customization of data and reports. To that end, the

platform's latest release has significantly improved the scalability

and has reduced demands on supporting hardware by two-thirds,

allowing more data and concurrent users to be managed than ever

before.

3. Enhancements that further simplify the collaborative

application developer's experience, making these applications even

more productive. Such enhancements include a richer web user

interface (UI), improved password management, and quicker data entry.

At a technical level, customers have since been able to define,

customize, and manage their web pages and web UI configuration,

thereby simplifying the configuration, maintenance, and expansion of

application web sites. Further, improved, more flexible installation

and configuration options allow customers to adapt the application to

meet their changing requirements.

The application is accessible to other programs by using the power

and flexibility of integration via Web services (see Understanding

SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More). XML is used for data mapping

and process definitions to Web services, legacy systems, and

databases, or to any other third party system. Again, this brings us

to the important ability of leveraging existing applications (that

is, a view and the extraction of the data from several disparate

source systems), such as order management systems, warehouse

management systems (WMSs), item masters, vendor masters, etc., and

aggregating them on a single screen, thus minimizing traditional

“hard-coded” integration costs.

This is part two of the series One Vendor's Quest to Garner a Global

Sourcing Ecosystem. Part three takes a deeper look at Eqos's global

sourcing offerings and how they could serve the retailing sector.



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-retail-sourci

ng-suite-built-on-experience-19126/