“I try to simplify the problems my colleagues in sales encounter creatively, forming a kind of bridge between IT and commerce. And of course with EDI I also help customers.” Marino van de Beek is responsible for the functional business processes at MCB, especially Sales, including EDI or ‘Electronic Data Interchange’: “I am not an IT specialist myself, no, my background is in mechanical engineering and I started out at Sales in MCB 26 years ago. I only facilitate the business process, now also for our customer Suplacon. Because they have transferred to ordering through EDI.”
“I assist as an E-business Adviser in the development of electronic order possibilities for our customers. A few years ago we put together a plan to promote EDI, but this appeared to be less easy than we had imagined, as customers often lack the necessary in-house knowledge. This is why we sought contact with our customers’ largest software suppliers, to create the EDI link with them. In the case of Suplacon, this was Ridder Datasystems.”
“At Suplacon we now have the order message live, this is great for us because we can now receive electronic orders: faster and with fewer errors. This doesn’t really change the workload for the customers, they only need to press a different button than before. The advantage for the customer is mainly that the automatic messages that we subsequently reply with: the order confirmation, invoice and electronic consignment note. We are working on this now.”
“It is a complex project: the technology aspect is manageable, but reaching good commercial agreements with customers and intermediary parties is a complicated matter. Even though we have a strong concept, that is a simple technical matter to present to the customer; all the parties are keen to realise. We are pioneers in the metal market, at MCB we want to do more than just transactions. But in the world of supermarkets, EDI is standard practice, you know, there everything that sells out is automatically restocked. But our customers are somewhat more complex than retail customers, they have a limited picture of what they will need tomorrow. And the industry is of course reasonably conservative.”
“We want our web portal to facilitate customer ordering and information through all possible channels, this is called platform-independent communication. The next step for Suplacon is making the order confirmation and the invoice live. We still need to reach an agreement concerning the consignment note, this is a sensitive issue. The fear exists that companies will start to become less critical of their entry checks if everything is computerised. This fear needs to be laid to rest, customers need to learn to trust that MCB has everything under control. We will then have a completely operational package for Ridder customers, it is logical that others will then follow. That’s what you call ‘Creating Progress’ isn’t it?”
