2010 is now behind us; many had a good holiday season while others, no so much. Regardless, it’s a new calendar year and time to start working on those 2011 projects. For some of you these projects will include the items that I’ve written on over the last 12 months such as –

• Adding a new method of distribution like Ecommerce, Cross dock or VMI, changing existing EDI transactions that are supported.
• Adding new systems of automation like Logistics, Inventory Availability or Finance related; this means new EDI transactions like the 846, 852, 830 or 753/754 documents
• Adding more trading partners to your existing supply chain automation

If you have projects for the above, “kudos” to you; for those that don’t, the battle for resources may be facing you for some of these, however, now is the time to shine in front of your peers and management.

In working with many different companies that have an EDI department, there is reluctance to do more than the minimum, or a lack of desire to grow your EDI program. I’ve heard excuses like  . . .

read more: http://see-links.com/1m

For all that 2011 will be about, let’s hope it’s mostly about this: jobs, and lots of ‘em. Being a cog in the technology sector, I was heartened to read Time’s article, “Where the Jobs Are: The Rights Spots in the Recovery” which noted that if you are in the tech sector, you are in one of the happiest places to be (job-wise, of course). Time points to network-systems and data analysts as the second-fastest-growing occupations in the U.S. after biomedical engineers.

I then read an interesting story on the Wall Street Journal that retailer Macy’s is adding about 725 new positions in the next two years as it expands its Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com ventures. Now I know 725 jobs isn’t a lot, but it is heartening to see growth in ecommerce. I’m a big champion of ecommerce. I do most of my shopping online, and was even an e-retailer for several years (I owned a brick-and-mortar kid’s store and one year after opening we opened our online, ecommerce channel. It substantially contributed to our sale.

read more: complete article.

Kent Niederhofer can’t find enough mechanical engineers to work for him — in southeastern Michigan. You know, where Detroit is, with its 13.3% unemployment rate. Niederhofer is president of the American branch of Ricardo, an engineering consultancy that designs the power trains of some of the coolest stuff around: Bugatti sports cars, huge wind turbines and unmanned aerial vehicles. “We are doing rocket science every day,” says Niederhofer. “It’s just not on rockets.” So Ricardo got a little desperate, renting a billboard to place a help-wanted ad that featured a picture of a sexy-looking sports car, the tagline “Why you became an engineer” and a Web address for job seekers. He calls it engineer porn.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2040964,00.html

Are you ready to heat up your B2B integration initiatives this year?

Happy Holidays to you and yours from the entire SEEBURGER family. May this holiday season bring you unexpected joy!

Drummond Group Inc. announced AS2 products have completed the AS2-3Q10 Drummond Certified™ Interoperability testing. AS2 is one of the most widely recognized messaging standards for B2B e-commerce with thousands of implementations around the globe. It enables users to connect, deliver and reply to data securely and reliably, thereby delivering cost savings and providing flexibility and control on how the data is utilized. (more…)

Posted by R “Ray” Wang, Nov. 22 2010, 2:08 pm

Less than three years ago, the mighty CIO controlled his organization’s destiny by shepherding multi-million dollar IT projects and ruling technology strategy with an iron fist. Business leaders had to pay homage to the IT team in order to implement any new business capability. IT leaders believed they led massive business change within organizations via technology adoption.

Unfortunately for many CIOs, those days are just fond memories. There are three forces of change challenging the authority, credibility and role of today’s CIO. (more…)

Written by Ken Kinlock, November 25, 2010

Yes, cloud computing is a great “mélange” (mix) with EDI; We know what EDI is, so what is ”cloud computing”?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
“Cloud computing is Web-based processing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices (such as smart phones) on demand over the Internet”.

WOW! An on-demand, cloud computing model for EDI/B2B, removes the limitations of IT budgets, IT staffing, EDI expertise and EDI systems. It is a pay-as-you-need-it concept. It takes the system from the in-house business and makes it just a hook-up, not another IT project.

The term “cloud” is used as a “symbol” for the Internet. You remember the “cloud” drawing used to represent the Internet in computer network diagrams? Cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software like a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers. (more…)

by Dennis Gaughan, Gartner Anlayst

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Gartner’s acquisition of AMR Research. In many ways, I can’t believe an entire year has gone by; it’s gone very quickly. One of the striking differences between AMR past and Gartner present is just the “virtual-ness” of the workplace. Given that most AMR analysts were located in Boston, a lot of our discussion and debate happened in a conference room, which is just not possible in such a large organization. That is not to say those conversations never happen at Gartner, quite the opposite. They just occur on the phone 95% of the time. I bring this up because we had some interesting discussion on the phone the other day about the potential adoption of ERP in the cloud, and that combined with some other data, will help influence our research agenda going in to 2011. (more…)

Posted by Bill Metallo in News
Tue, Nov 23, 2010 17:06 EST

With up to 80% of invoices still received by paper and fax, even the most automated enterprise finance and accounting departments face a challenge when it comes to invoice processing. Manual data entry inevitably involves errors, lost invoices and processing delays. It also forces paper and electronic invoices to be handled separately, requiring separate processes and associated inefficiencies.

For SAP users, SEEBURGER Inc.’s 4invoice purchase-to-pay solution addresses these issues by enabling paper, fax, PDF, EDI and web invoices to be processed on a single platform that eliminates manual data entry and manual SAP posting. The automation reduces overall processing time and costs by 40%. The faster processing further reduces costs by making it possible to capture discounts and avoid late payment charges. (more…)