Business Processes, Business-to-business, Electronic Data Interchange, Purchase order, Retail, Supply chain, Supply Chain Management

GXS Ups Retail Supply Chain Efficiency with Catalogue-Based Web Ordering

GXS, a  provider of B2B integration services, today announced that GXS Intelligent Web Forms (IWF) allows manufacturers to quickly and easily enable their smaller retail customers to issue purchase orders electronically. IWF creates forms to digitise the full lifecycle of supply chain transactions with the customer community from purchase orders and order changes to electronic invoices and remittance advices. By integrating directly with GXS Catalogue, the retail industry’s leading data synchronisation application that supports product, price and image information, web forms ensure that retail buyers can only select valid, preauthorised SKUs for inclusion on purchase orders.

Most large retail chains issue purchase orders to their suppliers electronically using EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) but smaller, independent store owners often lack the budget, resources and expertise to support these B2B integration technologies.  As a result, a high percentage of the purchase orders issued from smaller retailers are transmitted via fax, email or spreadsheet, creating an efficiency drag on the operations of large suppliers.  Using GXS web forms, suppliers of food and beverage, apparel and footwear and other consumer products can offer their customers the option to issue purchase orders online. As a SaaS offering, GXS IWF does not require small retailers to license, install or maintain software. The web-based forms mimic the paper equivalents making the application easy to use without training or technical expertise.

By integrating with GXS Catalogue, the web forms can present users with a preloaded list of available and authorised items for each customer.  Catalogue integration ensures that users do not mistakenly request SKUs that are unauthorised, discontinued or non-existent.  Retail SKUs consist of long alphanumeric strings which can easily be transposed or mistyped in an electronic ordering system.  Some SKUs have special characters such as hyphens or spaces which further complicate the order entry process. Catalogue-based web forms reduce the amount of exception processing and order handling expenses for suppliers.  Higher quality purchase order data also reduces the likelihood of shipping delays and out-of-stocks for the retailers.

“Leading suppliers of consumer products and general merchandise have automated many of the order-to-cash and demand planning processes with their larger retail customers. These large suppliers have struggled to gain the same efficiencies with smaller retail chains and independent stores,” said Melanie Nuce, director of retail industry marketing for GXS.  “Catalogue-based web ordering offers a cost-effective approach to quickly achieving supply chain efficiencies with small retailers and opens up the opportunity for better customer service.”


American College of Radiology, EHR, Electronic health record, Medical, Medical imaging, Radiology

DR Systems Launches Radiology EHR for Meaningful Use Compliance

DR Systems announced that its cloud-based ambulatory EHR for radiologists – the e|HR Meaningful Use for Medical Imaging solution — is now commercially available after successfully completing beta testing.

The radiology-based EHR launch was timed so that radiologists can meet the approaching deadline for complying with meaningful use requirements. Radiologists and their practices can receive federal bonus payments of up to $44,000 per radiologist by implementing a complete, certified ambulatory EHR such as DR System’s e|HR. To receive the full incentive payment, however, meaningful use compliance – not just acquisition – must be achieved by October 3, 2012.

“Many radiology practices are concerned about the staff workflow burden of an EHR,” said Chuck Scudelari, COO of Pueblo Radiology Medical Group (Santa Barbara, Calif.), a beta test facility for DR System’s e|HR. “But there is no substantive staff workflow burden with the EHR from DR Systems. It provides excellent value for the federal bonus payments and the workflow fits nicely within the existing registration process. Plus, we’re seeing that it provides other benefits for our radiology practice in addition to satisfying meaningful use.”

An estimated 90% of radiologists are eligible for radiology incentive payments from the CMS, according to the American College of Radiology. Radiologists will have to qualify before this October to earn the full $44,000, as the total incentive payment goes down each year. Failure to comply with meaningful use requirements will eventually subject radiologists and others to financial penalties.

“Radiologists come out way ahead by deploying a system such as ours,” said radiologist Murray Reicher, M.D., F.A.C.R., DR Systems co-founder and chairman. “First, they earn a substantial, five-figure incentive payment that far exceeds the cost of the system. Second, they actually improve patient care and the efficiency of their radiology workflow, including the collection of patient information and integration of that information with the EHR.”

Dr. Reicher is a recognized authority on meaningful use and was author of an article on the subject that was published in the September 2011 issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.


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Zendesk Pulls in $60 Million

Zendesk, the cloud-based help desk, has gotten $60 million in added financing split between $45 million in equity and $15 million in debt.
That gives it a total of $70.5 million in equity backing since it started in 2007.
Redpoint Ventures led the D round. New investors include Index Ventures, GGV Capital and Goldman Sachs. Existing investors Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners also kicked in.
Silicon Valley Bank is providing the debt financing.
The start-up wanted the money for global expansion, talent and development. It’s rebuilding its widgetry from the ground up but will reportedly keep the old application around to placate customers who hate change. The remake will tie into third-party systems like Salesforce.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Managing the Consolidation of Data in the Cloud

IT departments are experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing with growing constraints on space, power and costs to manage their data center infrastructure. Intel is helping businesses and users realize the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and with the Intel Cloud Builder and Intel Cloud Finder programs, which help people build cloud infrastructure as well as deploy cloud services. These tools together give Enterprise IT decision-makers information they need to plan both private cloud build out and public cloud service integration into their IT departments.

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Data Is the New Perimeter for Cloud Security

The cyber security market in 2012 is estimated at $60 billion, yet adding more and more layers of perimeter security may lead to a false sense of security and be completely useless against a determined system administrator working on the inside. The end result is that your data might be secure or it might not – you simply have no way to prove it.
Shawn Henry, FBI veteran of 24 years and now president of CrowdStrike Services had this to say about integrity at the Black Hat conference this year: “These days, you can’t just protect the information from being viewed. You also need to protect it from being changed or modified.”
This leads to the question: Would you know if an attacker or your own system administrator got to your data?
Traditionally, the ‘integrity’ component of the CIA triad of data security [confidentiality, integrity, availability] has focused on protecting the integrity of data. But proving the integrity of data – knowing you have not been compromised – is equally if not more important.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Address Your Big Data Needs with the Cloud

As data continues to grow at unprecedented rates, businesses are struggling to keep up with storage needs and requirements. A new type of cloud has emerged that helps manage information – Cloud 2.0, which puts the control of cloud hosting environments into the hands of business professionals. Now, companies can focus on their core business instead of on their IT delivery model – while still achieving control, flexibility, reliability and cost efficiency.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Robert Miggins, the senior vice president of business development for PEER 1 Hosting, will explain how the cloud can help meet your data needs by leveraging features such as resource pool allocation, and auto-scaling.

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How much cloud storage do you really need?

The unlimited ability to store data in the cloud is something of a dream come true for organizations that previously struggled to meet capacity requirements and keep up with fast-growing data stores, but lately, some new questions have arisen: How much cloud storage space do you really need? What data should you keep, and what should you throw away?

How can you evaluate your existing storage infrastructure to estimate your cloud storage needs? Answering these questions doesn’t have to be complicated; you just have to ask yourself what your needs are and be honest about the answers.

There are some basic cloud storage capacity planning questions that need to be answered. Rick Cook, a TechTarget writer, outlines the available capacity planning tools available and talks at length about how to best estimate your needs. He recommends asking five simple questions.

·      What data storage capacity planning tools do you have …

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Cloud Computing: A Quiet Game Changer in Education

Cloud computing is increasingly changing the education landscape.
Thanks to could computing, students from different locations around the world can collaborate on assignments, rendering them interactive among their peers in education.
The ability to bring together students and teachers via device and to enable them to accomplish entire learning tasks as if they were together in one classroom is just one benefit of cloud computing in education.
Yet this is not even the entire capability of the cloud effect in education. There is the whole aspect of ‘information durability’ which allows information to be stored in the cloud indefinitely, according to CloudTweaks.com.
Many schools have moved their resources online with libraries filled with hundreds of thousands of books that students can access at any time. The advent of online video has made the idea of cloud in education even more exciting because schools can produce teaching videos in any subject, upload them to their libraries in the cloud, and make them available to their students, according to the article.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Prepare Your Enterprise IT Talent for the Cloud

One of the cloud’s biggest draws is the capability to virtualize computing resources, allowing it to be consumed with the click of a mouse. But behind that simple click is an enormous infrastructure challenge that has recently been cited as a major cause for slower enterprise adoption. Enterprises can better prepare for this shift and take full advantage of future computing benefits. Between architecture design and migration planning, the road can be long, so what do you do with your talent?
In her General session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Technical Sales at Rackspace, will discuss how you can best prepare your IT talent for this seismic shift in computing.

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