TRANSORA, UCCNET UNVEIL AGREEMENT

DAN ALAIMO

MINNEAPOLIS -- The first of the big three business-to-business exchanges has entered into a formal working agreement with UCCnet, Lawrenceville, N.J., which aspires to set industry standards for electronic commerce.

The agreement with Transora, Chicago, was announced here last week at a Technology Summit held at the Food Industry Productivity Convention & Exposition by Paul Benchener, UCCnet's president and chief operating officer.

At the same time, the agreement was being announced in Chicago by Judy Sprieser, Transora chief executive officer, at the first of five Transora Global Symposiums. Transora was formed by many of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies. Two pilot programs between the two organizations are under way.

"This is the first official announcement from UCCnet of an alliance with the exchanges," Benchener told SN during the productivity show. It formalizes a working relationship that has already been established between Transora and UCCnet, he said.

"We have been working with and talking with Transora since it came into existence. A number of the participants in the Transora exchange have been working with UCCnet as individual companies, and some of the members of the Transora board are also on the UCC board. So this is a first step toward a more formal relationship. The next step is to work out the business relationship between the two of us," he said.

UCCnet has similar working relationships with the two retailer-controlled exchanges, GlobalNetXchange, San Francisco, and WorldWide Retail Exchange, which has yet to name a permanent headquarters city, although it is closer to a formal agreement with GNX, Benchener said. Formal agreements with these exchanges are just a matter of time, he said. He said he hopes to have both signed up within three or four months.

"We've been working and talking with GlobalNetXchange more at this point than we have with WorldWide Retail Exchange. However, many of the WorldWide Retail Exchange's members have been working with UCCnet, so there is a natural alliance, although it has not been formalized," he said.

The UCCnet foundational services, providing location registry services as well as item data that is industry standards-compliant and continuously synchronized, are seen by many industry observers as essential to the success of on-line business-to-business exchanges in the grocery industry.

"The Transora Customer Item Catalog is the foundation for CPG industry e-commerce. And the Transora-UCCnet alliance will enable faster, easier and more dependable adoption of our industry item catalog, resulting in reduced costs and improved value to our consumers," said Sprieser.

Two pilot programs have been jointly developed by Transora, UCCnet and i2 Technologies, Dallas. The first pilot successfully populated Transora's basic item catalog using UCCnet item registry data in the United States. Similar pilots are planned for Spain and Turkey.

In the second effort, Transora is participating in a manufacturer-exchange-retailer transaction flow pilot for data exchange and purchase orders with UCCnet, GlobalNetXchange, Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, and Metro AG, Dusseldorf, Germany.

"The industry is clearly moving beyond theory into practice. Now that the future is clear and solutions are selected, manufacturers, suppliers and retailers can begin the hard work of getting their catalog item data in order," said Ralph Drayer, vice president of efficient consumer response, Procter & Gamble. "It's not easy, but based on our experience, the rewards can be quite attractive -- both inside the organization and for your trading partners. The challenge is to begin now."

According to a press statement, Transora plans to have item and location catalog capabilities in controlled availability to its manufacturer, retailer and supplier participants during the first quarter of next year, although companies that want to use these services can begin working with UCCnet immediately.

Meanwhile, Benchener told SN that UCCnet's development is proceeding as planned and it will soon start expanding its universe of partners. "We went through a couple of months of implementation and integration with the pilot working group companies since our launch in July," he said. "That is now complete.

"The production of the system is scheduled for late October, and so we will then start putting in full production a number of companies beyond the six pilot working group companies."