Sept/Oct 2003

Wesupply adds dynamic alerting and event management to the visibility proposition, yet still claims to avoid reinventing the wheel

"The Web is ten years old now," says Brian Marsden, the recently appointed chief executive of software house Wesupply. "It's worth reflecting on that."

His point is plain enough. There's simply no reason, he is saying, for businesses to regard the Internet as some sort of new-fangled technology to be treated with caution or restraint. By now it should be integral to their IT strategy.

When it was launched at the turn of the decade, Wesupply took that view from the start. It delivers collaborative supply-chain solutions to businesses over the Internet, generally on an application service provider basis. In some ways it represents the quintessential model for a solution provider of the Internet age.

It quickly achieved a strong market presence, winning high-profile customers such as Caradon, Cotts, Grahams, IMI Norgren, Jewsons and Lear Corporation. Marsden, however, believes that the company can make even more impact by laying greater stress on aspects such as its use of advanced technology and its short implementation times.

He says founder John Luscombe put emphasis on the company's ability to deliver key business functionality. "It does that, but it can also do more."

Marsden was an ideal new recruit to the cause. He has a long history in the software market, and in recent years has been at the centre of various Web-based initiatives. He headed Software 2000, and was a senior executive at RockPort Trade Systems, which developed a supply-chain hub for global sourcing. He has also headed Manugistics' strategic business unit, and for a while was senior vice-president of international operations at QRS, a major San Francisco-based supply-chain and content provider.

Innovating

"Traditional IT has been restricting the implementation of innovative, creative business processes," he believes. "Executives are constantly under time pressure, and simply can't introduce new strategies quickly enough to reflect changing business demands. It's extremely hard for them to keep up with tasks such as assimilating acquired companies who may be running multiple IT platforms. Traditional IT solutions usually involve long implementation phases and massive complexity."

Wesupply by contrast claims to be able to implement a system in 90 days, and Marsden says Caradon got a system up and running in a remarkable two weeks.

Its solution is essentially a collaboration system that aims to help trading partners to work together seamlessly, yet avoids undermining their existing IT infrastructure. However, Marsden stresses that it does a lot more than just provide data mapping and translation functionality; it also includes features such as dynamic alerting and event management. "In fact we can provide solutions either for a category of business or for a specific operation. We take the view that the technology needs to be flexible enough to serve each client's objective."

To illustrate the flexibility of the solution, Marsden points to various examples in specific industry sectors. "In the automotive industry, we can provide line-side support," he says. "At Lear Corporation, for instance, we helped increase inventory turns on some operations from 45 to 160 a month."

Another example he cites is Jewsons, the building supplies specialist, where Wesupply has helped with invoice clearance. "We could even support a move to self-billing." And at Caradon, he says the company has even supplied equipment for producing barcodes for suppliers.

It's always illuminating to find out where software suppliers see their main competition, and the answer in Wesupply's case is particularly informative. Marsden says its greatest competition is the view that "This is too complex; we can't do it." He adds: "The second-biggest competition comes from companies who say 'We'll do this ourselves'."

The sometimes daunting complexity of alternative systems is a recurring theme in this market, according to Marsden. "A lot of companies tell us they need workflow event alerting, but they're worried about getting too much noise." In other words, he says, existing systems tend to provide an overload of information that is not specific enough to be useful.

Alerting, integrating, interfacing

Dynamic alerting is therefore one of the features that has apparently sold many existing customers on the Wesupply proposition. Another is the rapid process of integration, and a third is the fact that the company can provide standard interfaces not just with established EDI value-added networks (VANs), but also with proprietary systems from suppliers such as SAP, Oracle and Manugistics. Marsden says it can also take modern technology such as RFID in its stride.

He acknowledges that traditional ERP systems can be effective within an organisation (and he should know, having had long experience with them in the past), but says they may be less effective beyond the organisation. "It's unlikely that trading partners will have standardised on common file structures and business rules. Our approach recognises a business need."

Integration problems are especially likely to arise following mergers and acquisitions, he says. "Cott North America took particular advantage of our ability to help with the synchronisation process."

Visibility has become a widely used watchword in the downstream supply chain, but Marsden says that for Wesupply "visibility is often just the starting point." He says the company does offer it, "but when you get visibility, you want to know about the demand and supply situation. So we support forecasting, and can present the information in various ways." One approach, he says, is to use "intelligent agents" to do the alerting automatically according to predefined business rules.

Whilst Wesupply's core product has always tended to focus on trading relationships between businesses and their suppliers, inevitably the flow of information is two-way. Indeed, the classic Wesupply implementation requires companies at both ends of the transaction to subscribe to the concept.

More recently the company has taken the customer relationship proposition a stage further by launching a multi-customer support system. "We can establish an interface, a platform, through which suppliers can meet the collaborative requirements of all their customers," Marsden says. "They just need to post information once, and it will be received in the form of a standard message." He feels the company has stolen the march on the ERP suppliers here.

Having started out in the automotive industry, Wesupply quickly expanded into retailing and consumer packaged goods, and Marsden says it is on track to increase its customer base this year from a hundred to four hundred - a remarkable growth rate that he expects to achieve partly by converting suppliers of existing customers into customers in their own right. He calls this "the cascade effect".

He is a realist, and accepts that users place more emphasis now than ever before on achieving a perceivable return on investment in a relatively short time scale. He feels that with its fast implementation times and avoidance of complete re-engineering, Wesupply is well placed to deliver this. However, he is also keen to form links with the big consultancies that often recommend solutions, and sometimes play a part in implementing them.

"We're in discussion with IBM Global Services, Syntegra and Baring Point," he told e.logistics Magazine. "We believe we can help such organisations be more productive with their own customers."

He says one of his key challenges is therefore "simply making the consultancies aware that our technology is available, and persuading them that it can help them."

Wesupply remains wedded to the use of a hosted ASP model for delivering its solutions, and Marsden says that after initially being voguish, then falling somewhat out of favour, the ASP approach is now much more widely accepted. "I firmly believe online applications will become more common," he says.

"The system is configurable and secure. In fact the security aspect isn't as sensitive as I expected it would be."

It seems the world really is moving on; and Wesupply is moving on with it.