Supply Chain Collaboration

Retailers, wholesalers and branded manufacturers the world over face many of the same problems: long lead times, high inventory levels, massive expediting charges, and myriads of management and administrative overheads. All of this challenges the original reasons for sourcing internationally. A lot of these problems are caused by disconnected information flow and workflow and lack of visibility across the supply chain. Common examples: "We [a buying office] spends 2/3 of our time re-keying orders for the vendors and preparing shipping documents our customers", "We [a logistics provider] can't keep track of which order and invoice is the latest" and "It takes a lot of time for us [finance department] for us to check all the documents".

Why? Global sourcing is a complicated business that involves many parties and multiple disciplines. Consider the hundreds of processes, dozens of business transactions and hundreds of information exchanges (between many parties) that must occur to develop, source, produce, test, transport, declare, pay and finance a single order. Information related to (and changes to) an order ripple across your trade community largely manually today. It is not difficult to appreciate how delays and errors in any part of your supply chain can create a lot of problems.

How do you reduce lead times, place more frequent smaller orders and avoid having to ship products by air? How do you minimize the administrative overhead and eliminate data capture mistakes that in turn create more administrative overheads? Certainly not with today's manual procedures and limited visibility.

The solution is CBX Connect.

CBX Connect is the only open platform that coordinates communication and automates business processes between buyers, vendors and service providers. CBX Connect's powerful yet practical services empower organizations of any size, location, industry and technical sophistication to collaborate with their trading partners electronically, without heavy investments in IT infrastructures or staffing.

CBX Connect goes well beyond the traditional Value-Added Network (VAN) service that merely acts as a communications pipe. Core Solutions helps you choreograph each piece of information to match business process of your sourcing and supply chain requirement. In other words, you do not need to deliver any piece of information twice. CBX Connect ensures that right party receives right information, at the right time and in the right format.

Whether you are a buyer, vendor, logistics provider or bank, CBX Connect synchronizes communication, workflow and visibility with all your trading partners and throughout each step of your supply chain, from product development to production to settlement. CBX Connect helps you and your trading partners eliminate a large percentage of the data entry (and re-entry) that exist today and ensures that everyone is on the same page no matter where day are, day and night.

CBX Connect is open and flexible to support large corporations with sophisticated ERP systems, logistics providers and banks with proprietary systems and small organizations with little to no IT resources. CBX Connect is the only service that enable high-tech and low-tech organizations to work with each other through a combination of EDI/XML and proprietary electronic messaging, web-based application and EDI/XML to fax delivery (e.g., for trading partners that lacks internet connections) services.

The CBX suite - CBX PLM, CBX Sourcing, CBX Vendor Portal and CBX Connect - is the most powerful set of global sourcing software and services to help retailers, wholesalers and branded manufacturers streamline Product Development, Sourcing, Order Management, Production Management, Quality Management, Logistics and Finance.

CBX Connect modules include: