E-procurement

Minolta Group. Minolta, headquartered in Brno, produces diverse optical products including cameras, photocopiers, planetaria and specialized medical equipment. Noting the increasing momentum of e-business in its territory, Minolta identified a need to be the first in its business sector to enable dealers to submit orders and check their accounts online. They wanted to be the first office supply business pioneering in the e-business initiative and gain a strategic advantage over competitors. Brain Systems created ECS - an electronic dealer ordering system for Minolta. It enables the dealers to use an Internet connection to browse through catalogues, view prices in their appropriate dealer category, configure products, place orders, view order status, view list of debts and credits, etc. tech news

Headquartered in New York City and with locations across the globe, Bear Stearns is one of the world's leading financial organizations. With 10,500 employees spread across cities from Los Angeles to Sao Paulo and Hong Kong to Dublin, getting office supplies and distributed technology products to each of them can be a costly, cumbersome endeavor. The DB2 and Ariba Buyer system along with structured IBM knowledge-transfer program has eliminated paper-pushing from the procurement process, enabling just-in-time supply management, helping our employees better manage their expenses and improving cycle times. tech news

With banks reporting checks declining from 3-8% a year, the need to move to electronic checkprocessing has become acute. The October 28, 2004 effective date of the Check Truncation Act hascreated a deadline on which banks and industry associations are focused. Check conversion, in the form of ARC (Accounts Receivable conversion) and POP (Point of Purchase conversion), has already begun a sharp upward trajectory, growing in excess of 800% in 2003. This growth will continue, joined in 2005 by slow but steady growth in image exchange and check truncation. tech news

For Impol, dealing with around 400 customers in 25 countries by phone, fax and letter was proving inefficient and slow. For every alloy product enquiry, a critical Certificate of Quality describing the precise chemical and physical properties had to be printed out and faxed to the customer prior to sale. All stock level and order process enquiries were manual, too. To meet this need, they developed a new service, called ePIS (e-Production Information System), which gives customers fast access to live data over the Web. The solution was implemented on an IBM eServer zSeries Multiprise 3000 G5 server running VSE/ESA and z/VM. tech news

This paper presents shop2box system in which a customer can order over the Internet grocery that is delivered to a receiving box leased by the customer in his or her neighborhood. The aim of this paper is to focus on a Bluetooth application designed for the shop2box system and on its possibilities. The task of this application is to identify the system devices by automatically forming an authenticated Bluetooth link between the devices. After the identification, the deliveryman can open the receiving box for delivery and the customer can collect the order when convenient. tech news