The company describes UCM as a best-practice strategy for managing commerce processes and models across the extended enterprise. As e-commerce activities cross several functional areas from customer data to supply chain to purchasing and logistics, UCM aims to tackle the problem of handling disparate business processes by providing best-practice suggestions as to what processes are needed and how they should be implemented.
According to co-founder and CEO Stephan Schambach UCM describes a different approach to that of enterprise applications such as SCM, ERP, CRM because it takes an outside-in stance, focusing on the external business processes needed to enable e-commerce. It looks at what a customer needs to adopt e-commerce and use it, he said. They can be simple things but they are not necessarily a given. With the UCM, Intershop is hoping to drive up acceptance of the e-commerce model by making it easier for producers, suppliers, partners and customers to carry out business, driving up usage with the aim of producing higher margins compared to those that can be achieved employing traditional business models.
UCM is backed by Enfinity Multisite, the latest version of Intershop’s e-commerce software that provides the tools to integrate buy- and sell-side commerce, online self service functions, and organizations’ bespoke commerce models by enabling commerce-centric business process integration. Schambach said integration can be achieved without having to write code because Enfinity Multisite uses an XML interface to talk to external systems, comes with adapters for 15 leading enterprise applications such as those from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel and integration platforms such as IBM MQ Series, WebSphere and the .NET platform.
The application is shipped with pre-packaged business processes that can be modified using the supplied visual design tool. This approach is designed to reduce the time and cost of integration with external applications.
However, the processes do not conform to emerging business process definitions such as those being defined as part of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) or even vendor-specific approaches such as Siebel’s Universal Application Network although Schambach does not see this as a problem. I don’t believe anyone will succeed. It is a question of acceptability and complexity. Take as simple an object as a customer – if it is a consumer it is simple to define but if it is in a business [environment] you have to do an organization chart – it is impossible to define, he said. This belief is behind its use of a visual design tool to modify supplied commerce-specific business processes.
The German vendor says it has already got several leading names on board as customers and says Sony, HP and Deutsche Telekom have all adopted UCM as the basis for their commerce strategy.
Intershop’s combined best-practice strategy and supporting technology addresses the need for end-to-end business processes that cross-application and departmental boundaries and are geared towards achieving a specific goal – enabling organizations to use the internet as a commerce channel – an approach that is gaining in popularity. It is hoping that by removing some of the barriers, it can overcome organizations’ reluctance to invest – or more pertinently, reinvest – in e-commerce technology.
Source: Computerwire
