Telecoms giant proves e-business integration

Fujitsu Telecommunications in Birmingham is about to go live with $750,000 worth of automated and integrated, standards-based e-business system for its buy and sell side operations. The company is one of the beta sites for Fujitsu-owned ERP software company Glovia’s much trailed business to business system, and is set to start trading over the web in May, initially on around 50% of its procured items for customers like BT. Glovia, which has spent the last nine months reassessing its business and offerings to the market, looks set to start building again in the UK and Europe. Ben van Eck, European managing director, says the firm has now completed its restructuring, with some headcount reduction, and that the focus is now on ‘to order’ manufacturing and also e-business, but only in manufacturing. “We understand engineer-to-order manufacturing, and we can win business against anyone in this sector,” he says. However, whereas hitherto, the company has claimed an ability to compete at the top level with, for example, SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft, now van Eck indicates that the target is manufacturers in the £50—200 million turnover range. He points out that Glovia has several ERP implementations far bigger than that – indeed in organisations around the £1billion mark – but concedes that for now the focus is more modest. Specifically, he wants Glovia to target engineer-, make-, configure- and assemble-to-order manufacturing firms where Glovia’s expertise and functionality is well tuned. Glovia v7.0 ERP is now highly developed, he says, for the requirements of fluid bills of materials and long gterm project manufacturing and construction involving staged releases, version control, engineering involvement, project management and billing. He also indicates that the system particularly suits the electronics, automotive, telecoms and capital goods sectors – and the suppliers to these industries. Recent implementations have been with manufacturers of power station heat exchangers, refinery column trays and large scale capital equipment. As for the e-business aspects, these build on the company’s earlier vision, and will be included in the April release of Glovia v7.0, with Glovia.CS (collaborative system) and Glovia.IF (intelligent fulfilment). The former handles automated global trading; the latter, global order management, make/buy management and supply chain event management. Background to the suites is work with Fujitsu and its Interstage integration suite, now running in some 20,000 sites around the world.