Logistics technology: GT Nexus Trade and Logistics Portal is now SOA-compliant
Jeff Berman, Group News Editor -- Logistics Management, 9/23/2008
OAKLAND, Calif.—On-demand global trade and logistics technology provider GT Nexus recently announced that its Trade and Logistics Portal now supports the open standards of SOA (service-oriented architecture), which will provide Web-based service access to industry-standard ocean and air freight invoices.
GT Nexus spokespersons explained in an interview that the trade and logistics portal is a platform that blends a global network of integrated service providers (Carriers, 3PLs, brokers, banks and suppliers) with a stack of Web applications to automate processes related to global trade and logistics management. GT Nexus connects the physical and financial supply chains, allowing buyers, sellers, banks and logistics providers to work over a common platform with a core set of data that supports multiple trade and logistics functions. The portal’s core capabilities, according to the company, include global supply chain visibility, trade document automation, freight spend management, supply chain finance, landed cost and supplier enablement. And it added that shippers and transportation services providers like Xerox, American Eagle Outfitters, The Home Depot, Liz Claiborne, Sears, Weyerhaeuser, Schenker, DuPont, APL, Procter & Gamble, DHL and Del Monte select specific capabilities based on their business needs, paying as they go, for just the services they use.
Greg Johnsen, GT Nexus co-founder and executive vice president, told LM that one of the main drivers for GT Nexus to support the open standards of SOA was flexibility.
“Customers often choose very different application configurations to address issues specific within their supply chains,” said Johnsen. “Customers also use the data that GT Nexus captures and standardizes to ‘fuel’ other in-house software like ERP, finance or domestic TMS.”
Johnsen explained that while GT Nexus has been feeding to these other systems for years, some customers asked for the ability to have other systems “call” GT Nexus and get the data already standardized into SOA/Web services forms. The hard part of collecting and standardizing global trade data is already being achieved, he said.
“Making that information available via SOA was a natural, and somewhat simple, expansion for us. It all boils down to providing customers (and their partner communities) with options.”
The benefits of the GT Nexus Trade and Logistics Portal supporting open SOA standards vary, according to Johnsen.
For shippers, the main benefit, he said, is that they get standardized electronic freight bills in real time
“Standardization is the key differentiator, because it allows for seamless automation of the audit process,” noted Johnsen. “The old way of collecting bills from individual carriers required some kind of human intervention, because there is no standard. Even bills delivered electronically via VAN (Value Added Networks) are simply passed on in whatever form they are provided from carriers, so the shipper is still faced with some kind of translation and normalization.”
Johnsen added that many shipper customers also maintain their digitized carrier service contracts on GT Nexus, so the ability to compare standardized freight bills with standardized contracts becomes “a lights-out audit solution,” explaining that in today’s economic climate, accurate and timely auditing of freight spend has become very strategic for large shippers.
Carrier benefits, according to Johnsen, are two-fold. One benefit is that they achieve operational economies of scale.
“Once they have integrated to GT Nexus, that integration can be used for multiple customers,” he said. “From both an operational and IT perspective, carriers experience significant cost and process advantages.
The other benefit is customer service. Customers, especially big ones, said Johnsen, view their carriers’ ability to support them “with good, smart IT services as a key differentiator…[and] GT Nexus allows carriers to provide their customers with timely and accurate billing information. And, the carriers don’t need to change their internal processes to do it.”
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