Tradehub (Thailand) Ltd. is join venture company between Thai Industry Network and Tradehub Asia established to bring electronic commerce technology to Thailand. Tradehub is a sophisticated Electronic Commerce system which has been designed by Australian Business Ltd to satisfy the complex and challenging requirements of business to business commerce. Many Electronic Commerce systems have been designed to satisfy the needs of business to consumer type trading, but fail to deliver in the more demanding environment of business to business commerce. Tradehub was designed from day one to satisfy the needs of businesses trading with other businesses, and in particular to enable Australian Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to easily take advantage of the rapidly expanding Electronic Commerce marketplace.

 Tradehub consists of many features to help businesses extract the maximum benefit from electronic commerce:

Tradehub Architectural Structure

AOBL - Background

Intelligent Messaging   

Tradehub incorporates Frontec's intelligent messaging systems for use with the Internet, intranet, EDI, fax, phone or Email, effectively bridging the gap between customers and suppliers. The beauty of Intelligent Messaging is that an organization's entire supply chain, from end to end, can be automated.

Online Payments         

Tradehub will be offering a comprehensive range of payment facilities depending on what best suits an organization and the relationships it has with customers and suppliers.. All payment facilities are secure, ensuring purchases and sales are validated before being accepted.

Virtual Logistics Support

Tradehub will offer a "Virtual Logistics Organization" service that provides you with control over the movement of all goods, provides a tracking capability delivering early warning of late or problem deliveries and logistics performance reporting for both customers and suppliers.  

Vertical Markets

Tradehub also caters to the specific needs of vertical market sectors. Vertical Markets can be generic across industry sectors, such as the Health or Education sectors, can be tailored for individual suppliers to have a private vertical market to service their resellers, or for an organization that wishes to simplify business with it’s suppliers.  

Tradehub Architectural Structure

The Tradehub architecture is designed to be both flexible and scalable and to take advantage of modern technologies without the high risks associated with “bleeding edge” technologies. It is based on sound products and principals such as the Oracle Database Management system, the use of high end Sun servers hosted by Fujitsu, simple HTML forms interfaces, secure sockets and user authentication.

One of the key features underlying Tradehub is a robust messaging system from Swedish company Frontec called AMTrix that has been tailored to meet the open trading requirements of Tradehub. A more detailed description of the AMTrix product is contained in Appendix A, but it’s main features are:

Integrated communications including the Internet, VANs and MQ Series

Security and auditing

Message routing

Both EDI and non EDI (including flat file, direct database access)  message processing

Powerful GUI based any-to-any mapping definition

Highly scaleable through providing the same product on

Windows NT solutions

High-end UNIX systems

AS/400 solutions

Growth to future document formats and Intelligent Messaging

Architected for high availability functioning

Full logging of file and message processing and communication

Direct SQL based application integration  

The AMTrix messaging system allows Tradehub to satisfy some of the most demanding requirements of businesses who want to integrate Electronic Commerce with the their legacy computer systems, either through EDI gateways, or more tightly bound integration with Financial Management Information Systems (such as Oracle Financials) and Inventory Control Systems.  

Catalogue

Tradehub is designed to offer a comprehensive catalogue to allow buyer organizations to easily search, find and purchase goods, and to allow a convenient place for supplier organizations (especially SMEs) to host online catalogues of their products. The Tradehub catalogue is arranged to allow the contents to be viewed as a series of vertical markets. Vertical markets allow suppliers and buyers to nominate their area of interest and to restrict their access to only those areas of the Tradehub catalogue they are interested in. Examples of Tradehub vertical markets include:

   Industry sector verticals such as Healthtrade which contains many suppliers interested in selling to the health industry, and similarly many buyers who are part of the health sector such as hospitals and doctors;

   Single supplier verticals, such as that of IT supplier Storabyte Solutions who wanted a convenient way to service the needs of their national network of 70 resellers; and

   Single buyer verticals, where large buyer organizations wish a more efficient way of ordering products from their suppliers.

Within the vertical markets, products are arranged into a hierarchical tree structure of product categories, although products can be listed in more than one category to make it easier for buyers to find products. Data kept in the catalogue includes product codes (such as EAN, manufacturer codes, and supplier codes), product descriptions, pricing information, logistics information, images, and technical specification documents. Identical products available from multiple suppliers are easily identified in the Tradehub catalogue allowing buyers to easily compare prices.

Comprehensive searching capabilities are also provided via Tradehub’s web browser interface allowing purchasing officers to browse the catalogue, browse individual supplier catalogues, search by product descriptions and keywords, and search by product codes. Suppliers also have the ability to maintain their catalogue data online via Tradehub web browser based maintenance screens.

Via it’s comprehensive bulk loading facilities, and through it’s messaging interface, Tradehub also has the ability to interface to other catalogues, such as EANNET, and for situations where suppliers already have their catalogue data online.  

User profiles

While the Tradehub system is available to all organizations who wish to trade over the internet, they must be registered with Tradehub before they can buy or sell. Tradehub maintains a profile of the users with relevant information about each organization such as shipping and billing addresses, contact names and numbers, how the organization prefers to receive messages (EDI, email, fax, etc), sales tax exemption numbers and so on. By keeping this information online, Tradehub minimizes the risk of incorrect data being used in message transmissions. Obviously, this sensitive data is kept securely and is not available to any parties outside of Tradehub. In addition to the information about the business, each organization can assign and maintain their own Tradehub user logins. Each login is assign a specific role within Tradehub (such as a Purchasing Officer, Order Processor, Sales Administrator) which allows tight control of use of Tradehub within an organization.  

Purchasing, Order transmission and processing 

A purchase order enters the Tradehub system via one of several paths - a user clicking the “Purchase” button while browsing the Tradehub catalogue screens; a user entering a product code and desired quantity in the Tradehub bulk data entry screens; as the result of a successful price negotiation process (see below); or as a message from a buyer organization with existing purchasing systems. Typically, this will be in the form of an EDI message, although Tradehub does have the ability to accept messages in other formats such as email orders, or even FTP transmission of purchase details.

Once an order has been placed, Tradehub will transmit the order information to the relevant supplier (or suppliers) via whatever method the supplier organization desires. The preferred method of receiving orders is kept as part of the organization profile data (see above) and can be anything from an EDI message, email message, fax or even a message to the supplier’s paging service. The important point to note here is that the supplier is actively notified of the order, they do not need to log on to Tradehub in order to check if they have received any orders. Once notified of the purchase order, the supplier can then login to the Tradehub system via their web browser and normal internet connection and, via a series of maintenance screens, can examine the status of all orders received, accept an order, or decline an order. The system also includes the concept of “lapsed” orders, whereby the supplier has a specific time limit in which to respond to the purchase order request which is enforced by levying a transaction charge if the supplier does not respond in time.

Once the supplier has responded to the purchase order request (or if the order lapses), an appropriate message is sent back to the buyer, again via whatever message format the buyer organization prefers to receive. The buyer organization also has the ability to peruse the status of order requests via a web browser through the Tradehub system.

In a scenario where the supplier organization is unable to respond to the purchase order request through the normal Tradehub maintenance screens (for example, their ISP is down), a manual fallback system can be used to respond to the order via the Tradehub help desk. Once the supplier has provided suitable authentication details, the help desk operator can respond to the order on behalf of the supplier.  

Request for Quotation/Negotiation

The Tradehub system incorporates the facility for a buyer organization to request a quotation for a product (or products) from a supplier, or from multiple suppliers if the product is available from more than one source. Correspondingly, the supplier organizations receive the RFQs via their nominated message format (EDI, email, fax, etc.) and have a series of online web forms that allows them to supply a quotation back to the requesting organization. The buyer can make counter offers, and the negotiation process continues through Tradehub until either party declines to proceed or the buyer accepts the quote, at which point Tradehub automatically converts the quote to an order.  

Multiple Pricing

As well as standard prices for their products (typically Recommended Retail Price and Ex-tax Price), suppliers will have the ability to have different price scales for different buyers. As an example, it is not unusual for a supplier to give a discount to large buyers such as a major retail chain, so this system would allow the supplier to set a global discount of say 2.5% to all buyers from a particular chain, while still showing list price to all casual purchasers. As well as global discounting structures, suppliers will be able to set up different discounting levels and assign them to nominated product groups and/or for nominated buyer organizations, and even for individual buyers within buyer organizations.  

History and Audit Trail functions

Tradehub keeps detailed history records of all transactions between buyers and suppliers including purchase order requests (and the relevant responses from suppliers) and online negotiations. These records are available to authorized Tradehub users in both supplier and buyer organizations through the Tradehub browser interface. On a more detailed level, all of the individual messages (such as EDI documents, emails, faxes etc) that make up a transaction are also logged as a standard part of the AMTrix messaging system.  

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ABOL - Background

Australian Business On-Line, directly, and through Chambernet, has individual local access to approximately one third of all Australian businesses. Through local business chambers and similar organizations Chambernet provides trusted access to Australian business. We believe that no other organization in Australia can provide this platform for industry development.

In our support plan for e-commerce in Victoria we are already working with the Monash Center for electronic commerce to develop training and consulting programs. Another important Victorian partner is the Victorian organization Auslang who provide electronic content creation and project management skills.

One of ABOL’s key strengths that it brings to this project is its ability to motivate and enable the business community to participate in electronic commerce.  In conjunction with its parent company, Australian Business Limited (www.abol.net), it has a proven ability to introduce and deliver new business practices to local industry such as Quality Assurance Programs and Export Initiatives.  This ability is significantly enhanced on a national level through its capacity to mobilize state and regional business associations to participate in the marketing and training activities essential to early and successful take-up of new ways of doing business.

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