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Adoption Secures Industry-Leading Position for the WorldWide Retail
Exchange
2003 Proves Successful Year for Retailer/Manufacturer Collaborative
Efforts
Alexandria, VA (December 18,
2003) -- The World Wide Retail Exchange (WWRE), the premier exchange
for
retailers and suppliers, announced early results for 2003 today,
highlighting recent successes with its WorldWide Item Management
(WIM) solution, which facilitates management and synchronization
of product data, and its Collaborative Planner solution, which
enables supply chain collaboration.
“While we continue to gain traction in our procurement area,
with savings currently nearing $1.2 billion, we’ve seen a
definite shift in focus from the more simple, easy to implement
solutions to the complex collaborative areas that deliver sustainable
value,” said Colin Dyer, CEO of the WWRE. “We attribute
this not only to the maturity of our solutions, but also to the
integration and preparation that member companies have completed
on their back-end systems to maximize exchange solution benefits.”
WWRE’s Data Synchronization Solution Gains Global Momentum
The WWRE is implementing synchronization functionality in 8 languages
across 10 countries in Asia, the Americas and Europe. These parallel
implementations enable all members to simultaneously begin the
data alignment and standardization of item maintenance processes
that are required to adopt GDS. The WWRE also has interconnectivity
projects underway with more than 10 local country data pools,
which further illustrates its commitment to serving as a central
point of access to global data.
“The WWRE provides a standards-based approach to data synchronization,
and a single point of connection to our trading partners," says
Ruud van der Pluijm, VP B2B e-Commerce at Royal Ahold. "Not
only are they on the leading edge of developing and incorporating
industry standards into their solutions, but they are also working
together with organizations all over the world to ensure that the
right connections are built to allow WIM to provide clean, timely
and accurate data. This means that we can now deliver on the promise
to bring down costs in our supply chain and to give our buying
departments access to both the product catalogue and supplier information.”
Concurrently, the WWRE has been leading adoption and implementation
of EAN.UCC global industry standards, including:
Implementation of item and party data models (January 2001)
Implementation of version 1.2 BMS for item data (Spring 2002)
Early implementation of Version 7.3 item data model (April 2003)
The WWRE is a UCCnet “Preferred Partner in Sync,” and
is supply-side certified for machine-to-machine connection to UCCnet’s
GLOBALregistry™ and GLOBALhub.
New solution Sparks Growth on Collaborative Planner Front
In 2003, the WWRE partnered with Syncra Systems, Inc. to launch
a new version of its Collaborative Planner solution. This shift
brought about new functionality including: events, exceptions,
aggregations, scorecard/analysis, and alerts. As well, it brought
a solution that has seen broad-scale adoption among consumer
goods manufacturers. The WWRE has successfully transitioned all
of their existing implementations to Syncra, additionally, the
change has brought 8 new trading partner implementations and
3 new members live on Collaborative Planner.
"Because the Collaborative Planner solution is so flexible,
it easily meets the diverse needs of Best Buy and other WWRE members – regardless
of industry vertical or geography," said Jeff Johnson, Director
of Supply Chain Operations at Best Buy. "This flexibility,
coupled with the WWRE's customized implementation process and their
ability to integrate their hub solution with back-end systems,
helped us deploy four trading partners in just eight weeks."
Along with WIM and Collaborative Planner, the WWRE’s collaborative
sourcing program gained significant traction this year. In 2003
the Exchange completed 12 collaborative sourcing events with 17
companies yielding an average savings of 20% per participant. The
WWRE found that Members using collaborative sourcing saved an additional
33% in 2003 than those members using individual auctions only.
Building on this success, the WWRE currently has over 50 collaborative
auctions scheduled in 2004.
The WWRE is the only exchange that has stayed true to its original
vision of being the premier Internet-based business-to-business
exchange for retailers and suppliers, and will stay consistent
with this vision in offering a full platform of Procurement and
Sourcing and Collaborative Supply Chain solutions to its members
in 2004.
About the WWRE
The WWRE is the premier Internet-based business-to-business exchange
for retailers and suppliers. Designed to facilitate and simplify
trading between retailers, suppliers, partners and distributors,
the WWRE currently consists of 75 members and participants from
Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America with combined
sales of approximately U.S. $900 billion. To date, the WWRE has
saved its members over $1 billion through the use its solutions.
For more information, visit the website at www.wwre.org or www.worldwideretailexchange.org.
Jane Wilson
703.234.5208
jwilson@wwre.org
or
Summer Stitz
Stanton Communications
202.223.4933
sstitz@stantoncomm.com
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