From bottled water producers in France to American retailers, paper manufacturers in Finland and United States-based auto supply retailers, there’s been an explosion in demand for building out global supply chains and a myriad of new ways to integrate supply chain data.

Vendors of all stripes are working overtime to meet the demand for global visibility of shipping data for all parties to a shipment in a variety of ways, from e-commerce platforms that unite carries and shippers using one transport mode, to development of global platforms for one enterprise that then connect to supply chain partners. There are software developers offering “translation” services so companies can cross platforms and vendors creating soup-to-nut platforms and attendant networks where a business can reportedly have all its global supply chain shipping, logistic and compliance needs met in a one-stop shop.

For example, Evian, the French-owned premium bottle water producer, operates a supply chain that extends across bottling facilities in eastern France at Lake Geneva, warehousing in France and Belgium and distribution operations with strategic partners across North America with export to over 120 countries worldwide.

Last fall, the company’s owner, Groupe Danone, announced it had signed an agreement with GT Nexus of Alameda, California, to provide hosted software and information management services to assist Evian North America improve global supply chain operations. GT Nexus creates hosted technology platforms to connect supply chain partners globally “and provide integrated management software create benefits across entire communities of supply chain participants,” said Aaron Sasson, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer.

American Eagle Outfitters, based in Warrendale, Pennsylvania, is a top retailer for teens to young adults and works with about 500 suppliers and liaisons in mainly Asia and the Indian Sub-continent. The retailer turned to TradeStone Software in Gloucester, Massachusetts about a year and a half ago to unify their buying process on a single platform, says Sue Welch, TradeStone CEO.

“American Eagle has multiple technologies for multiple purposes, so we provide them a one-user experience,” said Welch, explaining that their technology acts as a sort of super-translator, accepting data from any source and any system. “We work side by side with transport platforms and cross all categories for customer building in the global commerce community.”

On-line platforms maturing, but aren’t for everyone

Jim Preminger, Management Dynamics

Not long ago, World Trade explored companies extending their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from their internal enterprise to supply chain partners. While this activity continues, particularly among the largest global corporations, already it seems a variety of online platforms are coming into their own, whether they focus on providing shipping-related services for one transport mode, or also offer logistics services or cross transport modes and service arrangements like GT Nexus and Management Dynamics.

Consider AutoZone, a national auto parts retailer based in Memphis, Tennessee, which has turned to Transplace to handle its transition to global sourcing, predominantly in Asia, says Tom Sanderson, Transplace President and Chief Operating Officer.

According to AutoZone officials, Transplace has become an extension of the AutoZone enterprise and is the single point of contact for transportation logistics, providing the people, processes, and systems to accelerate AutoZone’s growth. They credit Transplace with savings over $2 million as of 2005 between conversion of truck lanes and more efficient tools to allocate freight.

Stora Enso, a global integrated paper, packaging and forest products company based in Helsinki, Finland, ships more than 1.2 million tons of product out of its Gothenburg, Sweden, and Hamburg, Germany transportation and distribution centers to production facilities in Europe, North America and Asia. Last fall, it announced it was connecting to ocean industry platform INTTRA to streamline its electronic communication with ocean carriers shipping its cargo worldwide.

“Between its mills and its carriers worldwide, Stora Enso has a complex supply chain. Different carriers needed to use different interfaces. The idea was to minimize the workload and streamline as many of the processes as possible,” said Anna Wilhelmsson, supervisor and coordinator of the Stora Enso Infologistic Service Support Team.

Some large corporations still want to develop their own global networks, says Tim Kelsey, BAX Global Vice President for Strategic Account Development based in Atlanta, Georgia, citing the example of an Internet tech company that “wanted one platform and one lead logistics provider for all their inbound Pacific freight. We provide them the technology to integrate all their data via a tool called Viewlocity. What we’ve built provides both visibility and event management,” or the ability to automate alerts and avoid crises while en route and in a totally customized fashion.

Kelsey says this approach is really limited to a “a few customers with global markets that have global solutions. Even those with a single ERP system are working with a multiple of tools, so alignment around people and systems is a major struggle.”

The ‘right approach’ depends on who is talking and selling

Tom Sanderson, Transplace

While vendors will tout their approach as the best and most likely to prevail in a heavily competitive global marketplace, there is some accord among experts that the future belongs to those solutions that not only provide data visibility, but can offer logistics management and event planning.

Jim Preuninger, CEO of Management Dynamics in East Rutherford, N.J believes his company’s approach is the way to go—a hosted Web solution providing hardware, software and the network to bring suppliers and customers together as it is doing for The Children’s Place, a Seacaucus, N.J.-based specialty children’s retailer. Management Dynamics recently announced it was handling the retailer’s internal order management system for a large network of consolidators and international transport professionals in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.

Both Preuninger and Sanderson of Transplace point out that there are plenty of vendors offering software, but no network. According to Sanderson, top players in this sector include Glog (recently acquired by Oracle) and i2. Then there are platforms that cater to a single transport mode or just offer port-to-port service. Or, customers can go to the larger freight forwarders like a Schneider Logistics that are “limited to the visibility of the cargo moving with them,” said Preuninger, who considers all of these solutions outmoded.

He and Greg Johnsen, GT Nexus Vice President of Marketing, believe the future belongs to those players that will provide “global trade management (GTM), or supply chain event management technologies needed to handle cross-border trade. You want to integrate these processes and create a platform so everyone within the enterprise that deals with international trade has the right capabilities,” says Preuninger.

Not only should this system be able to track and manage inventory, purchase orders, provide global trade and logistics documents, landed costs and global transportation spend, but Johnsen says the ultimate system must be customizable. “I don’t believe one size can fit all. We believe that the most cost-effective, low-risk way of integrating your global supply chain is to leverage an on-demand technology platform so you don’t install and manage the software yourself. The third-party provider manages and delivers the software over the Web.”

He points out that “it’s very expensive and complex work for a single customer to build this sort of platform on their own, that’s part network, part data and part applications.” The Web-based platform that hosts a network of customers and services costs less and means that customers “can get up and running much faster than traditional approaches.”

Although extending ERP systems to supply chains is hardly non-existent, Johnsen says he hasn’t found one customer with an ERP system “who has done a decent integration job with their supply chain partners in a single system. It’s doable, technically, but I haven’t seen it in terms of real-life customers.”

Transplace is also a “very big believer in on-demand hosted technology solutions. We know where the suppliers are in other parts of the world and have contact to ocean and air carries. If you’re Wal-Mart, maybe you should do it yourself, but there’s only one Wal-Mart,” Sanderson said.

He cites the case of a global medical instruments company that connected to their network last fall and was able to be up and running in about three months “with no capital expenditures on the company’s part. And we didn’t have to develop an EDI link with all their carriers, but were able to provide links to many of the carriers they already used.”

Over the last five years, INTTRA, based in Parsipanny, N.J., has built the world’s largest on-line platform for ocean, handling 61 percent of the world’s ocean container capacity, according to Tim Gannon, INTTRA’s Vice President of Product Management. Rather than offering services that cover the international trade spectrum, he says INTTRA is focusing on providing global shipping data visibility in a secure fashion.

“INTTRA provides a single connection point to access ocean carriers, execute transactions, track shipments, obtain management information and exchange vital shipment information with all supply chain partners,” says Gannon, who adds that INTTRA is more than an integrator. We also provide “execution and analytic tools that help users monitor, plan, and execute shipments with their supply chain partners.”

INTTRA is purposely sticking with a business model that focuses on “operational excellence” and being “the industry provider of the best, most accurate and timely data for ocean. People can call us old-fashioned, but we’ve heard great claims from software vendors and it comes back to how well you can execute. We stay focused on ocean execution because it’s not easy and there are always new wrinkles to master,” said INTTRA CEO and President Ken Bloom.

With customers who can be “anyone buying and selling goods across international borders who want to unify that process,” Welch at TradeStone believes her company has the solution that ties all of these disparate approaches together—the ability to help customers communicate across platforms, while working “side by side with the transport platforms,” she says. TradeStone “crosses all categories.”

She says TradeStone’s Web services technology “allows us to read information to another system that is not the customer’s own, which means they don’t need to replicate the data and they don’t need to replace their technology. So, for example, American Eagle receives shipping data from GT Nexus and then we display that data information to the buyers within American Eagle. We replace GT Nexus as the display because our technology can function across multiple systems.”

Analysts like Manny Hontoria say all options cited here have merit depending on the customer, their needs and resources. Principle of Boston, Massachusetts-based Mercer Consulting in the Transportation and International Logistics sector, Hontoria says whether the link is Web-based, ERP or a desktop solution, the “challenge is increasingly using the information to systematically drive costs and complexity out of the supply chain.”