Event Summary
At eLink 2000, Commerce One announced the launch of the Commerce One Affiliate Program to syndicate business services for e-marketplaces. More than 40 business services providers have signed on to participate in the program and offer their services directly to buyers and suppliers on the next generation of Commerce One.net (formerly named MarketSite.net) and through syndication to other e-marketplaces.
Commerce One hopes that business service syndication will make it easy for e-marketplace operators to tap into the services their buyers and suppliers need to conduct e-commerce without the lengthy process of identifying, negotiating and partnering with business service providers.
Among the more interesting vendors participating in the Affiliate Program is Entrada Software. Entrada makes Kinnosa, an application that helps complex discrete product manufacturers maintain the history of a part through every phase of its manufacture: design, prototype, procurement, build, test, inventory and defective parts tracking.
Market Impact
Entrada's fresh face belies a long and varied history in the manufacturing arena as a software reseller, consulting firm, and most recently, a software vendor. The product-centric paradigm upon which its latest incarnation is founded gives Entrada an advantage over other enterprise manufacturing software vendors. Typical software for maintaining information on parts and finished goods allows one to record only snapshots of information, such as specifications, default inventory locations, or supplier reference numbers, with perhaps some user-defined fields for test results or contact names. The manufacture of complex items that involve collaborative design and engineering requires the ability to represent time and, more specifically, the ability to record the evolution of the product through its checkered lifecycle, where multiple participants may have an impact on the final outcome. This is precisely the functionality that Kinnosa delivers.
Another key aspect of Kinnosa is collaboration. By enabling parts suppliers to communicate current inventories to manufacturers, Kinnosa introduces a bottom-up element to the design process. A bottom-up approach advocates designs that utilize existing parts and can greatly reduce the cost of manufacturing final products. Entrada successfully combines a product-centric view of manufacturing with collaboration, something no other vendor currently does. For evidence that a real market need exists for this combination one need look no further than the recall of faulty tires by Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone tires, an operation that could have been facilitated by Kinnosa's tracking capabilities.
User Recommendations
Entrada makes sense for those manufacturers involved in aerospace & defense, high tech electronics, automotive/complex industrial machinery and others for whom the path of manufacture is as important as the completion of the item. Does Entrada make a selection for Commerce One almost inevitable for discrete parts manufacturers? TEC says "Not yet." Entrada's partnership with Commerce One is fairly new and users should not see it as a "feather in Commerce One's cap" until something more than a press release is forthcoming from the alliance.