E-Procurement. Supplier. (EPS). Portal. in.B2B

The implementation of stage one was based on the results of an analysis of supplier-related
processes and the successful development of a process and functional concept for the supplier
portal for CLAAS prepared in advance of the implementation. The implementation included
installation and configuration of hardware and software, development and implementation
of defined functionalities, and deployment and testing of the application.
The processes for order, delivery, proposal, and invoice have been implemented based on
the standard described from the VDA (German Association of the Automotive Industry)
The EPS system represents one of the purest forms of Web-EDI e-business models for B2B.
There is no EDI server needed. The data interchange between the Web-EDI-server and the
SAP-Systems are transferred via a WebSphere connector using XML (Steinert, 2002). IBM
Global Services consultants state that a return on investment for a Web-EDI project using
EPS can be achieved in approximately two years on average.
The goal of the project was the successful implementation of the supplier portal for
e-procurement and supplier collaboration for CLAAS, a leading manufacturer of
agricultural engines in Germany with customers around the world. This supplier
portal supports sourcing and procurement processes of the company by providing
a web-based interface to suppliers and enabling efficient data interchange over
the Internet. The implementation approach divided the implementation of the
system into three stages with each stage containing a subset of functionalities
of the total planned scope of the project.