OrderChannel Powers B2B Application on HP e3000
Fioranti-Redwood International (FRI) has announced that OrderChannel, B2B e-commerce software for developing business portals and order management centers, is powering eSalt, a new B2B application used by IMC Salt Inc. IMC Salt, a business unit of IMC Global Inc., sells a range of salt products to industry, agriculture, and food processors, as well as road de-icing products. It uses eSalt to provide order management and customer serice to brokers, wholesalers and manufacturers. OrderChannel integrates with IMC Salt's back-end systems so that orders taken online go directly into the systems without re-entry.
ESalt's back-end system runs on an HP e3000 979/KS/400. The application is built in FRI's OrderChannel using Windows NT and SQL Server 7. IMC Salt execs say they chose OrderChannel primarily because of "the ability to integrate business systems with existing customer service functions through user-friendly interfaces."
"The HP e3000 is very well suited to e-commerce applications," says FRI President, Mark Redwood. "Many corporate customers think they need to invest in lots of new technology to implement e-commerce, but OrderChannel's ability to integrate with multiple platforms lets them leverage existing infrastructure."
To provide the solution, FRI created an application that integrates with IMC Salt's custom-built ERP system. The ERP system handles production scheduling for all IMC Salt's plants. All of the company's products are manufactured to order, yet IMC Salt must offer customers the ability to place orders, check order status and review order history at any time. The new solution does all this and allows customers to save incomplete orders, place new orders from saved templates, and track orders online.
Redwood says that eSalt provides customers with ways of accessing information with "minimal training and handholding." It also, he says, includes not only complete ordering and order management but also portal features, like links to product information and industry groups.