Ann Arbor, MI November 26, 2002 Fullscope, a provider of e-business solutions for mid-market manufacturers, this week rolled out its new product suite, an integrated Web-based platform with pre-packaged business processes designed to enable collaborative commerce between manufacturers and their trading partners by extending the functionality of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
The provider said its WiseXE product suite is intended to meet the requirements of Fortune 2000 companies that need to extend their processes beyond their firewalls to encompass their trading partners and customers and within their firewall across multiple internal divisions.
"Manufacturers want to move their business processes to the Web by extending ERP systems to remain competitive in today's challenging economic environment," said Don Springer, president and CEO at Fullscope. "Having the ability to conduct business 7x24 in a personalized manner improves customer retention and increases revenue."
WiseXE consists of three different components that provide escalating levels of functionality and collaboration. At the entry level, WiseVIEW offers a portal through which a company's customers can pull information from the company's back-office systems, including order status, statements, invoices, inventory history and shipping details.
At the next level up, WiseB2B enables two-way communication between a company and its customers through a suite of pre-bundled transactional business processes with supporting functions to leverage information in the back office. The suite enables B2B transactions in real-time, including B2B sales, B2C catalog, order entry, warehouse inventory management and fulfillment, quotation entry, competitive analysis and configuration.
Finally, WiseAPP Framework offers a development environment that provides tools to create and customize forward-facing applications that are integrated to enterprise applications, allowing companies to expose additional business processes to their trading partners.
Fullscope is targeting the new suite at midrange companies, which it defines as those with annual revenues of from $100 million to $500 million. According to John Scandar, vice president of sales and marketing at the solution provider, the suite costs between $150,000 and $200,000 on average, although entry-level implementations can be as low as $30,000, and implementation times run from 30 to 60 days.
The return on investment in the suite comes in the form of increased sales through tighter integration with customers, as well as the opportunity to open new channels, said Scandar, who added that customers are typically seeing a ROI on the solution in six months.
Kent Allen, research director at technology consultancy Aberdeen Group, offered an upbeat assessment of the new solution. "Mid-market manufacturers need a cost-effective way to both streamline the exchange of real-time customer information and to begin automating business processes via the Web," Allen said. "Fullscope is providing the Fortune 2000 with a unique [collaborative commerce] solution, one that helps these organization optimize their existing ERP investments and, in doing so, offers partners throughout their demand chain greater visibility into product information and other data that drives go to market processes."
