Stephen Cochran, Chief Technology Officer latest blog steve.cochran@inovis.com As Chief Technology Officer at Inovis, Stephen Cochran oversees both the product development across Inovis' software lines of business and the production operations of Inovis' hosted services offerings. His infrastructure responsibilities also include information services across the company as well as the project management office, which manages the prioritized cross-functional projects across the corporation.

Q: What is Business Community Management?

A: Business Community Management is primarily made up of three major components. The first component is a secure, reliable communications platform that a company and its trading partners can communicate on in a consistent, reliable fashion. The second layer is the automation tools that go on top of that communications layer that make it perform better, faster and more efficiently without error. And then on top of that, probably the most exciting part, is the visibility and governance component of the platform, which is comprised of things like vendor scorecards or vendor compliance where you're really trying to determine if your community members are performing at the appropriate level that you want them to, and being able to look at that data in real time and and in a way that is meaningful over a period of time.

Q: How can Business Community Management bring a trading community together?

A: Even the companies that have excelled in automating their business communities have only enabled about 30% of their communities, because the methodology that is applied today is typically very complex. Business Community Management provides companies with the ability to engage customers that are at the highest level of technology sophistication, but it also enables the businesses that are running QuickBooks, a web browser or even just a phone so that they can communicate in the mode and the method that they're comfortable with. The enterprise, or the hub, of that community, is able to receive information consistently from all of its trading partners—whether it comes from a very large enterprise or a smaller shop that only sells one thing a year for Christmas.

Q: How have real companies leveraged Business Community Management to their advantage?

A: I've had an opportunity over the last few months to speak with several of our customers about Business Community Management. One Fortune 500 company I spoke to said, "You know, we use Inovis today as our communications platform and automation platform, and we've extended that not only to the traditional EDI order process, but we also use it for all of our documentation to our products. So, we've gotten rid of our managed file transfer platforms, and we now use Inovis for that." Furthermore, Inovis' SAS 70 certification meets all of this public company's SOX compliance requirements. Inovis takes care of on-boarding new vendors and they don't have to invest the money themselves to do that. And for this company that translates into millions of dollars of savings.

Another example is of a large retailer in the US that implemented our Business Community Management platform. By automating more of their supply chain and order processes, they have removed a tremendous amount of errors. The validation services the platform provides also offsets significant cost. Overall, this company has reduced costs by about 54% on Inovis' Business Community Management platform.