iICE (V2.1) - Blizzard

Consensus Software Awards

Brief Product Description

The iICE™ solution provides users with the ability to create, aggregate, manage & share product information in a collaborative manner with any trading partner, whether it be a customer or a supplier.  iICE™ allows catalogues to be managed as a single product database that supports multiple classification standards simultaneously (including UNSPSC, NATO, UCC) and facilitates the sharing of this information in any electronic format whether it be an unstructured text file or a XML document (including popular CIF, CUP, cXML, xCBL, ECX standards).  Our company vision is to provide leading-edge technologies that eliminate the need for repeated hand-over and repeated handling of product information as products are traded across the supply chain.  Hence our motto:

Catalogue Content – “CREATE ONCE, USE ANYWHERE!”™ 

Unlike competing products that are either buyer-centric or supplier-centric, iICE™ empowers its business users with an end-to-end catalogue management solution that serves both buy-side and sell-side requirements.  This flows directly from our recognition that every business is both a buyer and supplier of goods & services.  With iICE™, users avoid the time-consuming, labour-intensive process of converting product information from and to 3rd party standards as they trade across different industries and different marketplace platforms.

By using intelligent software algorithms that map the relationship of catalogues between each buyer and each seller, iICE™ allows suppliers to differentiate their catalogue offering whilst making it available and accessible in each buyer's customised 'view'.  This way, catalogue content is automatically maintained according to the specific requirements of each individual trading relationship.  As iICE™ supports multiple standards simultaneously and effortlessly for them, users are not required to 'normalise' their product information to any one particular standard or format.

The iICE™ solution has been designed to meet the e-catalogue management needs of most business organisations.  At its core is key functionality that enables the user to integrate and transform data from many different supplier sources, create customised catalogues for publication directly to customer’s procurement systems, and manage changes to catalogue content efficiently and cost-effectively.  Some of the key features and benefits of iICE™ include:

• Sophisticated Profile Manager:
  iICE™ features the ability to create catalogue views and data transformation rules based on each individual company’s profile and relationships. This means that product information can be easily customised in terms of the format and detail of information that a user sees and how that information is organised (for example, a customer in the pharmaceutical industry may require different product details to another in the biotech industry; a business customer may categorise products differently to a consumer; one supplier may use industry terminology and jargon that is different to those of another).

• Powerful data transformation capabilities designed to assist the catalogue manager with the importing data from many different suppliers formats & exporting to unlimited customised formats for customers, whilst preserving and even enhancing the integrity and quality product information.
  
  
  
• ‘Personalised’ parametric searching capabilities that allow the user to find only product information that is relevant for their individual needs accurately and quickly.
  
  
  

Innovation

This promise of unprecedented efficiency improvement is possible because of the novel way in which iICE™ deals with information management and catalogue integration.  Unlike existing data integration tools that prescribe fixed data schemas & formats and hence require programmers to implement and customise, iICE™ empowers the business user with simple, yet powerful tools to create an unlimited number of data attributes, product ontologies (templates that define the characteristics of each product type) and taxonomies (product categorisation structures) for the building of their catalogues.  This way, the user has unlimited flexibility to define any number of customised catalogue formats and structures to meet the specific needs of their trading partners.  iICE™ also provides the mechanisms to make data maintenance and quality assurance effortless without the need for repeated database re-design or programme code re-write.

Innovit's key differentiator is derived from our recognition that the best way to solve the problems of catalogue management is to eliminate the causes of inefficiencies along the supply chain. By developing a technology that enables organisations to fundamentally re-engineer their business processes for the sharing and management of electronic catalogues, iICE™ is not only delivering productivity improvements at the task level within an organisation, but also achieving market efficiencies across the supply chain.

iICE™ is an application breakthrough for end-to-end catalogue management that recognises every business, being both a buyer and a seller, has to trade across a network of many relationships, the bridge that supports each and every trading relationship is the product catalogue. On the buy-side, iICE™ allows a business to automate the integration suppliers' catalogue into their back-end procurement & inventory systems. On the sell-side, a business using iICE™ can publish their catalogues in a 'personalised' format directly to each customer’s procurement system or through their web site.

Hence, we are promoting the concept of "Create Once, Use Anywhere™ - that is, catalogue content is created once and shared with any user anywhere without the need for costly re-processing of product information." 

Innovit’s iICE™ solution has been developed with a multi-tier architecture using Java and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) technology. We have separated the user interface, business logic, and data storage into distinct components using industry standard protocols.

The iICE catalogue can be accessed from both a desktop client interface or remotely via a web browser. This avoids the need for expensive upgrades to client hardware infrastructure since the user can access the application via the Internet.

The business logic layer is built upon standards compliant J2EE Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and components that communicate with a web browser via Java Server Pages (JSP) or XML Style-sheet Templates (XSL).  By implementing EJB technology, iICE™ achieves state-of-the-art linear scalability that can support thousands of concurrent users. The use of Java based technologies ensures that iICE™ is portable across all major hardware, operating system, database platforms, similarly, use of J2EE compliant implementations ensures that iICE™ is also portable to all major web and application server technologies such as Websphere, Weblogic, Apache, iPlanet, etc. The system's data storage interface supports any JDBC compliant database management system (for example Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server).

This flexible architecture, using standards-based Java technology ensures that iICE™ is capable of being implemented on most existing platforms without the need for additional infrastructure investments. The result is a robust and scalable solution capable of handling the needs of the largest of multinationals, yet simple enough for the most nimble SME.

Performance 

The iICE™ solution is cost-effective and adds strategic value in the following ways:

1. Empowering e-business: No one knows the business better than the organisation does, with iICE™ every organisation has total control over how their product catalogue is managed and presented.

2. Return on Investment begins immediately:
   · Custom catalogues can be sent to customers & marketplaces
   · Supplier catalogues can be imported into company systems effortlessly
   · Access new marketplaces and new opportunities whilst reducing catalogue publication costs:
   · Enable compatibility with customers' e-procurement systems
   · Strengthen relationships with customers by supplying customised catalogues
   · Reduce costs by taking most manual labour and re-working of catalogue data out of the process
   · Provide an affordable and scalable means to enable frictionless electronic trading.

3. iICE™ is offered in two modes of operation:· ASP hosted version: catalogues can be managed over the web, giving smaller businesses access to leading edge technology without large infrastructure investments. By providing smaller suppliers with a self-service solution to host, manage & aggregate their catalogue content via the Internet, iICE™ significantly reduces maintenance costs for buyers and marketplace operators.· Self-hosted: for larger organisations with sophisticated catalogue management needs, iICE™ can be installed on internal servers to provide advance content management and publication functionality.

Potential 
Forrester Research found that although most companies report only moderate on-line trading today, by 2004 they expect to purchase 39% of direct materials and on average, 64% of indirect (or MRO) materials on-line.

According to Forrester Research, the top three goals for purchasing executives choosing to trade on-line are:

• Improve process efficiency;

• Reduce product costs; and

• Improve information flow.

Businesses must be prepared to participate in the on-line environment or risk missing out on the opportunities - this will become critical as over 50% of business spend is conducted on-line by 2005;

Product information as packaged in catalogues will be increasingly more important as electronic catalogues take more of the selling load. Buyers expect to get more information about products on-line. The quality of product information will become an important differentiator in the long term.

Businesses will trade on-line with many other businesses as the barriers to setting up new relationships fall, and the universality of the internet will allow businesses from around the world to communicate with each other.

Other information the judges should know 

Innovit, winner of 2000 Yellow Pages "Business Ideas Grant", Austrade "Silicon Valley Mission Competition" and Australian Technology Park "New Business Creation Prize" is a high-tech company that provides leading-edge catalogue content management solutions to help suppliers and buyers become Internet-enabled quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.

Web site: www.innovit.com 

Live reference: www.amc-atp.com 

Requested method of presentation

Our customers and partners tell us that iICE offers a novel approach to collaborative e-catalogue management. iICE™ is introducing a new conceptual framework for business that will enable them to re-engineer catalogue management processes for frictionless cross-enterprise trading, we would be happy to show it's potential via demonstration in person.

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