Manufacturers' reps may not like buying software, but will they pay for service?
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 12:00:00 AM
Being a service house for an open source software platform is starting to pay off for companies like Red Hat and SuSE as the Linux operating system they support grows in popularity.
Now, a division of Brunswick, the Lake Forest, Ill.-based company known for making bowling pins and other recreational equipment, hopes that model can help it profit from a business integration and process management application it originally developed for Brunswick's internal use.
"Our business model is based on our core competency of doing integration projects, not selling software," says Michele Lambert, general manager of WDI, which was founded in 1999 primarily to help other Brunswick divisions institute Internet-based business processes. "So we decided to open source this product. That allows us to expose it to other manufacturers."
Brunswick has been using this product, called BIE (for Business Integration Engine) for roughly two years to conduct business with the thousands of independent dealers that sell Brunswick products. It, in effect, has allowed Brunswick to lower the cost of doing EDI transactions by moving them to the Internet.
Lambert says WDI built the engine because it could not find a packaged application that would allow Brunswick to exchange purchase orders, inventory updates, and other information with a set of dealers that range from mom-and-pop shops with a single PC to publicly traded companies with 57 outlets and sophisticated IT networks.
Lambert says BIE can accommodate the data-transfer needs of any two trading partners, regardless of what applications, operating systems, or databases they deploy.
The system has two main components: a transport and transportation layer that includes a dashboard for building and managing business processes, and a map builder that is used to translate and format data before it is transferred over the Internet.
Lambert says a retailer used the system to reduce a five-day manual process for sending point-of-sale data to corporate headquarters to a one-minute exercise.
She argues that an open-source package of this type will be especially attractive to manufacturers that sell products through dealer channels because "it's tough to get channel partners to adopt an expensive commercial package, but they are receptive to being able to download it for free."
Once they have the free software, Lambert hopes a large percentage of those dealers will be willing to pay WDI for help with installing and learning how to use the package.
