At the heart of our fully managed service is iXchange..
iXchange
Designed to easily integrate with your core applications, iXchange allows our clients to implement sophisticated SCM solutions, across entire customer bases or trading communities, without the need for any additional hardware or software.
iXchange in detail
iXchange is an on-demand, hosted and fully-managed platform and suite of complementary modules that from its very inception over ten years ago was designed to virtualise a complete end to end supply chain.
iXchange consists of:
Supply Chain Platform - At the core of the solution is a fully-managed platform that’s exclusively made visible to all or selected participants in a specific supply chain via a Web Browser. The platform is delivered via SaaS so your entire community can simply plug in to the iXchange cloud without the need to purchase any additional hardware or software.
Supply Chain Business Objects – iXchange comes with a library of supply chain business objects that can be implemented to provide immediate rules, logic and functionality. Current objects include for example - vendor managed inventory, inventory collaboration, forecast collaboration and unique business processes for selective product categories, customers or channels.
Supply Chain Object Development Environment – We realise however that no two supply chains are the same and regulatory and competitive advantages have very different effects across retailers, financial services and chemicals and pharmaceuticals for example. Therefore we’ve developed a rapid “supply chain object” development environment that allows us to deploy, customise and, if needs be invent new workflow, business logic and functionality for individual customers.
Supply Chain Messaging & Integration – The iXchange cloud also contains sophisticated any-to-any message and network transport protocol translation capabilities. For a fixed fee and timescale, First B2B will map all messages across the entire trading community, immaterial of complexity and format. This service removes one of the major stumbling blocks faced by supply-chain initiatives and facilitates the rapid exchange of data between trading partners and their computer systems, without the need for any additional software or hardware.
Supply Chain Presentation Layer – For SCI applications that reside outside of core computer systems, iXchange includes a highly configurable, browser based presentation layer (We call it TMV internally). This allows you or your trading partners to see the documents exchanged between your organisations, to change how you view these documents using the screen painting functionality and to print individual documents or reports. Every individual word in each document is indexed so that you can perform a 'Google' type search on all the data you have exchanged through First B2B.
Supply Chain Community Management – The true measurement of success for any supply chain solution is the percentage uptake and strength of business benefit felt by its trading partners. First B2B therefore includes as part of iXchange (at no cost) complementary services to recruit, train and maintain trading partners.
Remove the traditional barriers to entry, including cost, complexity and speed to market, by plugging in to our iXchange cloud. You gain immediate access to a combined suite of products and services that include:
- Supply Chain Business Objects –A library of supply chain business objects that can be implemented to provide immediate rules, logic and functionality.
- Supply Chain Object Development Environment – A rapid “supply chain object” development environment that allows us to deploy, customise and if needs be invent new workflow, business logic and functionality.
- Supply Chain Messaging & Integration – A fully-managed service, it includes any-to-any messaging and network protocol translation for all trading partners.
- Supply Chain Presentation Layer – For SCM applications that reside outside of core computer systems, iXchange includes a highly configurable, browser based presentation layer.
- Supply Chain Community Management - Complementary services to recruit, train and maintain trading partners.
- Supply Chain Data Synchronisation -- No integration service can claim to be complete unless it offers a comprehensive Data Synchronisation Service such as iRules.