Minister's Forerword
Introduction
Credits
Acknowledgements
EDI Factory (Celerity)
PROJECT OBJECTIVE
STANDARDISED E-COMMERCE TRANSACTION SERVER
EDI factory, now known as Celerity, is a leading developer and provider of advanced transaction-based e-business solutions and e-business infrastructure in Ireland. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, the company was incorporated in 1989 as EDI Factory and has a wide range of blue chip clients in Ireland and in Europe.
For the first eight years of the company’s existence, it focused on EDI consultancy, systems integration and developing tailored electronic trading solutions. The company gained particular prominence in the retail /grocery sector. Since 1996, the company has focussed on servicing the internet technology requirements of its customer base.
Business Case for e-Commerce Infrastructure Project
EDI Factory had already developed an innovative value-added service called On-Line Trader. On-Line Trader is essentially an on-line business transaction clearing house. It is a secure Internet based EDI B2B service for the retail grocery sector. The On-Line Trader service is supported by three major companies in the retail grocery sector, namely BWG Foods (Spar Shops), ADM (Londis shops) and Barry’s (Quickpick and Emerald shops).
On-line Trader supports the exchange of price lists, purchase orders and electronic invoices. The support for these transactions is based on the integration of On-Line Trader with standard business applications such as Take5, Access Accounts, Pegasus and Sage.
The need was identified both to enhance the capabilities of On-Line Trader and make it available to a great number of SMEs who lack sufficient resource to invest in IT.
E-Business Solution
EDI Factory has enhanced On-Line Trader to provide a standardised e-commerce transaction server for companies doing business over the Internet. A user company can:
- Populate its own portion of the On-Line Trader database with its products prices;
- Configure customer and supplier details into the On-Line Trader;
- Specify the set of electronic transactions that it wants to support with trading partners.
In addition to acting as a generic e-commerce server, On-Line Trader will continue to act as an electronic transaction clearing housefor other e-commerce sites and business applications that are not transaction-enabled.
On-Line Trader now includes the following features:
- Support for standard Internet browser interface via e-forms for the creation and display of electronic business transactions such as price list, product catalogue, purchase orders and invoices.
- Automated mapping between information contained in any of the support formats (csv, EDIFACT, e-forms, XML)
- Automated reporting based on reconciliation between transactions (e.g. automatic check between invoices issued and remittances received)
- Public key encryption (previously On-Line Trader was based in the use of proprietary symmetric keys).
- E-commerce company registration service and repository. Each user company is given a unique identifier number from the coding system administered by EAN International. The unique code is based on a combination of the ISO telephone prefix (e.g. 353 for Ireland), the company registration number and a range of incremental numbers for each company.
- On-line sales and distribution infrastructure for software utility programmes.
Who will benefit from this e-Commerce Infrastructure Development?
On-Line Trader is operational in some of the following sectors; Celerity is in negotiations to establish On-Line Trader pilots in the remaining sectors:
Retail Grocery
Healthcare
Public Administration
Clothing
Insurance
Celerity
Parnell Business Centre
125 Parnell Street
Dublin 1
Tel: + 353 1 679 0383
www.celerity.ie
email: ken.halpin@celerity.ie