B2B revenues in S'pore hit $106.5b
Source: AsiaOne, March 2004
By Amit Roy Choudhury , Business Times

SINGAPORE registered sales revenues worth $106.5 billion in business-to-business (B2B) transactions in 2002, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) told BizIT ahead of an e-business conference aimed at keeping the Republic's players at the forefront of Asia-Pacific B2B developments.
 
IDA is collaborating with RosettaNet Global HQ and the local extensible markup language (XML) user group, XMLOne, to hold E-Business Connections 2004, which opens tomorrow. The two-day event incorporates the RosettaNet Global Partner Conference and XML Asia 2004. Top officials of RosettaNet, including its president and chief executive Jennifer Hamilton, will address the meeting.
 
RosettaNet was founded in 1998 in the US to create, implement and promote globally-accepted standards for common B2B processes.
 
The 40 founder-members, which included IT manufacturing leaders like Intel, NEC and Siemens, were joined in October 2000 by several electronic component (EC) and semiconductor manufacturing (SM) companies.
 
In 2002, RosettaNet merged with Uniform Code Council to strengthen the development and adoption of common B2B standards across the industries served by the two organisations. Today, RosettaNet is a consortium of more than 500 of the world's leading IT, EC and SM companies.
 
Since its formation, more than 7,000 companies globally have implemented their B2B information exchange solutions using RosettaNet standards.
 
Asia is the fastest-growing region in implementation, as most of the global companies suppliers and distributors are based in Asia. The leading countries in RosettaNet implementations are Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and China.
 
Since RosettaNet was introduced in Singapore in 2000, more than 100 Singapore-based companies have completed or are in the process of implementing RosettaNet. Some of the companies driving RosettaNet adoption here are AEM Evertech, ST Assembly Test Services and Seagate.
 
According to Wong Cheong Phong, vice-president of Asia IT for Seagate, a big user of RosettaNet, the adoption of the standards for B2B supply chain in the electronics industry helps 'achieve customer satisfaction through greater flexibility and responsiveness'.
 
Noted Mr Wong: 'The evolution of the digital marketplace has changed the way companies conduct business and work with other organisations, making supply chain excellence a critical competitive factor.'
 
He observed that Seagate has successfully engaged its Singapore-based small and medium-sized suppliers in a project leveraging RosettaNet's partner interface processes (PIPs) to exchange information on forecasts, shipment and inventory management.
 
AEM Evertech, another company which has been using RosettaNet, is also very pleased with the results. According to S K Lee, vice-president for corporate development of the company, the return on investment (ROI) for the company after using RosettaNet has been 33 per cent.
 
Explaining, he said the previous paper-based system by which they got orders had a response time of two to four hours whereas in RosettaNet's B2B system the response time was just two to three minutes.
 
'Besides, in our paper system we had three people working on the orders whereas in the present system the manpower count has been reduced to just 0.2 and the customers are satisfied by our almost instantaneous response time. All this has been calculated by us to result in the ROI of 33 per cent,' he added.
 
AEM Evertech's IT manager P K Chow said the B2B system was introduced in the company in February 2002 and fully implemented by June 2002, adding that in the previous paper-based system there was an error rate of 2 per cent with some of the paper purchase orders being misplaced. 'In the new system this error has been totally eliminated.'

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