A major factor in the evolution of the Web is Electronic Commerce: the ability to buy, sell, and advertise goods and services to customers and consumers. When the business transactions primarily take place between two different business entities and not so much with the consumer, a definite need arises for negotiation and foremost the product features or the catalogue . The main strengths of a B2B exchange are benchmarked on its ability to give support for negotiations and returns on the value for time and money, the flexibility in terms of arbitrations, ease of use and top of all, manage the manageability, which is administering the activities and maintaining customer relationships.

Online trade needs to offer the same convenience as the telephone-based infrastructure has been giving for over a hundred years. Trade has been intuitive and based on the experience and knowledge about the demand-supply of the commodity by the trader. The trader will need to negotiate on the product, packaging, insurance, warehousing, freight, shipping, credit and similar transaction related information. Auctions have constituted only about 5% of the transactions in the world commodity trade. It is only when a trader has the entire infrastructure for fulfillment that the trader will have the confidence to transact online. Online negotiations need to offer the same convenience to the traders to retain higher confidence and hence, usage. Online B2B business vies with the telephone in the real world.

RFQ Management — Buyers can create and manage their RFQs directly online, either starting with previous requests as templates or entering or importing information about products, delivery schedules, payments terms, etc.

Offer Management — Sellers can create and manage their offers directly online, starting with a buyer’s request and entering or importing information about price lists, products, availability, terms and conditions, etc.

Negotiation — Buyers and sellers negotiate in a structured manner, utilizing well-established negotiation techniques to iteratively bring their transaction to conclusion and establish detailed commercial agreements.

Agreement Templates — Similar to current manual processes, existing agreements may be used as templates to start the development of new agreements between parties.

Workflow — The highly collaborative process of creating a request or an offer is greatly facilitated by Hermes, which tracks current status and ownership as users contribute and approve content. The equally collaborative process of exchanging requests and offers between organizations is also facilitated and expedited by tracking communications and maintaining a full audit trail of all information exchanged between parties.

Security — The information exchanged in these requests, offers, and agreements is often highly critical and confidential to the parties involved. Therefore, Hermes employs PKI technologies to authenticate and authorize transactions with an Audit Trial to retain transaction history.

Notifications/Alerts — Notifying negotiation teams about changes in status is fundamental to expediting the development and evolution of commercial agreements. Hermes tracks the status of all requests, offers, and agreements and sends alerts to end-users and other systems regarding any status changes. COMPUSOL offers wireless integration and SMS messaging to provide anywhere-anytime messaging.

Change Management — Commercial agreements are rarely static in nature. Relationships evolve to continue to meet the needs of the marketplace. Hermes provides end users with the ability to rapidly re-open and re-establish agreements, dynamically, to ensure agreements always reflect the ever-changing aspects of the relationship.

Audit Trail — Fundamental to the development and application of commercial agreements is the concept of non-repudiation – preventing disputes later over what commitments were made in support of each party’s intent. Hermes tracks all changes, as well as the identity of the user making these changes, to allow for comprehensive non-repudiation and to ensure the validity of agreements reached through Hermes.

Archives — Creating and managing the volumes of approved terms and conditions for an enterprise is a complex practice, often not well performed. Hermes provides a “clause library” which stores approved text for standard terms that a company conventionally uses. Clauses are easily stored, updated, and retrieved for use across agreements.

Net Cost Analysis – It is necessary to track the net-cost to enable buyers to make a comparative analysis of multiple offers and the landed cost of the goods. Hermes offers Net-Cost analysis through the iterations to aid the trader, especially in making comparative analysis while negotiating.

Service Providers- Trading partners will need real-time data about the services in order to determine the net-cost. A trader may need to plan shipment between two points with available ships from the cargo handler. Hermes interfaces with service providers, such as shipping, credit rating, insurance, finance and information to provide real-time data and determine commercial implications

The solution architecture is based on Windows DNA Framework. The architecture focuses on high Fault Tolerance, Transaction Reliability and Solution Scalability, the virtual wish-list for a mission critical enterprise solution. The architecture uses SOAP/XML along with MQ technologies for availability and EAI within the banking IT infrastructure. Loosely coupled component-based architecture allows components to easily integrate and manage. The solution uses the multi-threading model, providing multi-user transaction processing seamlessly. The key architectural advantages of the proposed solution include:

• The solution architecture is based on Windows DNA framework, which leverages state-of-the art SOAP/XML-COM+ technologies in conjunction with the Microsoft Transaction Server support.

• The Component-based solution ensure longer product life cycle and reduce obsolescence. It provides higher scalability and change management.

• Asynchronous communication using MQ and XML gives high Fault Tolerance & Error Handling and Reliability.

• PKI-based security to ensure high data integrity, authentication, non-repudiation and encryption.

• SOAP-XML-Web Services solution in line with state-of-art standards, ensuring longer product life.

• Advanced Document Object Model for providing greater control and interactivity

• Component Services for Scalable, Flexible and Balanced Transaction Services

• Integration Architecture for access to all structured data stores

• Universal Data Access

• The component based solution adhere to

  • Cross-Platform

  • Binary compatibility

  • Location transparency

  • Code reusability

• Trading model as in real world
• Fulfillment-oriented
• Iterative and structured model for on-line trade
• Option of Anonymous Trading
• On-line transaction Analysis Tool
• Trading Templates - to use past experience!
• Buyer centric - procurement model
• Link to service providers
• On-line Credit Rating form Coface
• Online Credit Risk Insurance
• In-built Duties and Levies calculator

• Product
• Packaging
• Warehousing
• Shipping
• Freight
• Credit Rating and Insurance
• Finance and Interest
• Duties and Levies
• Net Cost Calculation and Analysis

• E-hubs and B2B Exchanges
• EAI solutions
• EDI Solutions
• Software Development & Services
• Business Modeling & Process Definition
• Software Engineering Services

• IBM
• Microsoft
• Citibank
• Siemens Information Systems
• Novo Nordisk
• Bharath Electronics
• The TRADCO Group
• Sony Software
• Phoenix Global Solutions