By ADAM GIFFORD
Auckland firm eCom is expanding into Australia on the back of its Revolution e-commerce solution, which allows companies to move into business-to-business electronic commerce without throwing out their old systems.
Managing director Aaron Cornelius said the company was installing Revolution procurement systems for organisations in Perth, Sydney and Brisbane, and was also talking to big retailers. .
It is also in talks with Farmers Deka and Progressive Enterprises in New Zealand about implementing elements of the solution.
Revolution requires eCom to act as an application service provider (ASP), channelling orders from a retailer to its suppliers in whatever format the parties wish to use - fax, paper forms, electronic data interchange (EDI), e-mail or web communication based on the emerging extensible markup language standards.
Mr Cornelius said the idea came to him last year on a flight from the United States, where he had been looking at various e-commerce systems.
"You can't take a quantum leap from paper-based systems to 100 per cent e-commerce. What about small suppliers?" he said.
Created in 1996, eCom built up a strong technical team with expertise in data capture, imaging software, document management and workflow, built around products from Colorado-based Optika.
As well as Optika software, eCom's ASP hosts EDI translation software and TELEform software from Cardiff, which includes extremely sophisticated optical character recognition capacity further enhanced by eCom internal development.
Mr Cornelius said eCom supplied Farmers, Progressive, the Earthquake Commission, the Ministry of Fisheries, Coca-Cola Amatil and the Auckland University of Technology.
The company's strategy is based around solving whatever problems a client is having with paper-based systems, automating their business processes and transition to a web architecture at a rate which suits the client.
Early last year it signed a five-year agreement with Farmers Deka to design, implement and support a solution to replace a paper and microfilm-based filing system.
Retail Financial Services, Farmers' credit arm, wanted every document relating to a customer stored for easy, quick retrieval.
It sends its documents to eCom for processing and archiving.
If there is a query, Farmers staff can retrieve the document the same day, rather than waiting a week or more as happened under the paper-based and microfilm systems.
Mr Cornelius said a new credit application form had since been designed for Farmers.
"We worked on improving the process, and got it down from quarter to half an hour to approve credit down to minutes."
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