Gaithersburg, MD March 19, 2002 GE Global eXchange Services (GXS) this week rolled out a new suite of B2B e-commerce services designed to automate the contract compliance process between buyers and suppliers.
GXS will host and operate the new services, intended to help companies eliminate invoice overpayments, capture supplier rebates and reduce contract-processing costs.
The solution provider said its Contract Compliance Services suite addresses challenges faced by companies such as foodservice franchises, hotels and consumer goods chains that lack visibility into supplier-to-distributor invoices, which are based upon negotiated contract prices.
The services are accessible over the Internet and provide the following capabilities:
· Invoice compliance: a buyer automatically matching 100 percent of submitted supplier-to-distributor invoices to the appropriate supplier contracts, which GXS said will eliminate overpayment of invoices and identifying off-contract purchases for appropriate action;
· Contract maintenance: a buyer managing supplier contracts electronically, ensuring one-to-one comparison of line items across suppliers, and identifying overlapping, duplicate or expired contracts for appropriate action; suppliers enabled to send invoices electronically through various means, reducing cycle times and costs associated with manual invoicing;
· Rebate capture: a buyer electronically tracking applicable supplier rebates associated with contracts, which GXS said will allow the buyer to capture the maximum rebate associated with product purchases.
GXS has implemented a customized contract compliance solution for SUBWAY restaurants' Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC), which oversees annual purchases for more than 15,000 SUBWAY franchises. GXS says that the solution, called IPCnet, has increased pricing compliance from supplier to distributor by 98 percent during the first year of operation and currently generates savings of approximately 2 percent on $1.5 billion spent annually by SUBWAY franchises across their supply chain.
George Labelle, director of information services for SUBWAY restaurants' Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC), said: "GXS has provided us with a Contract Compliance solution that is based on open standards and can handle supplier invoices in any format. Having successfully implemented our supplier community, GXS now operates our contract management network at the highest level of security and reliability."
Contract services is just the latest of GXS' expanding portfolio of B2B solutions and services. Last month the company rolled out a hosted strategic sourcing solution, Source-to-Pay Services suite, which provides facilities for posting and responding to requests-for-quotes (RFQs) and online auctions, as well as catalog purchases, invoice tracking and payment settlements.
For information on the latest contract automation solutions, see "Digging Out from the Contract Clutter" in the January 2002 issue of iSource Business (http://www.isourceonline.com/article.asp?article_id=2233).
