Sidebar: Getting to Real Time

Computerworld - E-Way started out with a much simpler objective. "When it started, it was essentially a one-way order system, an online catalog," says Wayne Aiello, vice president of e-business services. "They'd find a product and send an order into InVision," the company's ERP system.
That has changed, however. "It's transforming itself into a two-way interface between us and the customer," he says, "so as we continue to add more transactions, we are bringing more information from our supply chain forward to the customer."
Corporate Express has a number of supply chain and financial systems, plus interfaces with the systems of its suppliers. Any information from those sources is potentially available to present to customers using the webMethods integration tool. Corporate Express already uses that tool to retrieve real-time inventory balances from its InVision system and send them to customers via E-Way. But if an item isn't in stock, it doesn't tell buyers when it might be on the shelves again. Soon E-Way will also retrieve the item's estimated date of receipt based on the supplier's information system.
Corporate Express also plans to push more order-status information to customers, including who signed for a delivery at the customer site. A point-of-delivery device will capture that data and send it via a service of Aether Systems Inc. to a warehouse management system, where webMethods can grab it and present it to the E-Way user.

Read more about E-business in Computerworld's E-business Topic Center.