Cupertino, CA April 5, 2001 Portal Software has announced that it has won a contract from Toshiba Information and Industrial Systems and Service Company to provide Portal's customer management and billing platform as the underlying billing infrastructure for Toshiba's B2B e-marketplace.
Toshiba set up its marketplace, e-ing Biz.com, last year to streamline its own procurement supply chain. e-ing Biz.com combines a number of processes, procedures and products that are part of the procurement process. These include procurement operations for inter-corporate transactions, document management, workflow control and electronic catalogues. Toshiba also acts as an application service provider, offering e-ing Biz.com on a business footing to other organizations that wish to make use of the application.
Toshiba will use Portal's Infranet to standardize and centralize a number of procurement billing systems that have been developed by its subsidiaries, thereby reducing development and maintenance costs.
"Although we already had a billing system in-house, once we evaluated Infranet we realized it would give us much more flexibility than our existing system," said Takayuki Matsudaira, e-net operations division chief engineer at Toshiba. "This was important since we knew we would be introducing improvements and upgrades to the system. The fact that it can handle complex billing was yet another point that appealed to us. These features greatly reduce both start-up and future development costs. We introduced e-ing Biz.com in the last fiscal year and have already reduced the cost of procuring parts. We now plan to introduce the system to all Toshiba companies, affiliates and customers."
As part of the evaluation process, Toshiba dealer Itochu Techno-Science Corporation (CTC) developed an Infranet-based prototype billing system and installed it in less than two months.
"The speed at which the project could be implemented was an important consideration in the final decision-making process," said Matsudaira. "In the end, Toshiba conducted the evaluation, and CTC handled education and consultancy. The ease of installation was so remarkable that the introduction of the simple-to-construct Infranet solution is being studied at a number of other companies in the Toshiba group."
