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.