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Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Shortens Procurement Cycle for European B2B Marketplace

As companies throughout the world are upgrading to Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12, they’re seeing how the platform’s new capabilities will directly impact their organizations. One adopter is i-Faber SpA, a leading European provider of Web services and co-founder of 1city.biz, the B2B marketplace that last year facilitated 3,300 negotiations and €1.1 billion in contract awards.

Release 12 will power 1city.biz’s continued growth, including planned expansions into additional European countries, says Paolo Granata, i-Faber product strategy sourcing manager.

For Granata, R12 offers three important new features that i-Farber can use to strengthen 1city.biz:

New Sourcing Tools
To augment the auction engine, users of 1city.biz have been requesting some related tools, Granata says. Release 12 offers unique RFQ (request for quotation), RFI (request for information), and RFP (request for proposal) utilities that are integrated within the auction and procure-to-pay transaction environment. “Having a unique tool that is able to manage these aspects of the negotiation is definitely a great story to tell to the market,” Granata says.

In the past, i-Farber relied on its own proprietary technologies to accommodate these three tasks. This forced users to leave the auction application and run separate tools, which relied on different interfaces that users had to spend time learning.

With R12, all of the processes will run within a single tool. “This is definitely a benefit because users can use the information they gather to help them as they go deeper into the sourcing and supply management process,” Granata says. “Users will have complete visibility and don't need to log out and jump into another application to make their requests.”

Daily Business Intelligence
Oracle’s set of reporting and analysis applications for delivering timely business information will give 1city.biz users complete views of their transactions. “Daily business intelligence will tell customers how much they’re saving in a particular negotiation, or they can see a summary of all the categories they are making purchases in,” he says. “This is definitely the ultimate solution for us to sell to our customers.”

Greater Usability
“This means that the professional buyer can log in to our platform and access all the information he needs to do his daily job,” Granata explains. “We can have a calendar that shows open negotiations, the awards that have to be completed that day, the contracts that will expire and need to be renegotiated.”

The combination of integrated tools, detailed information, and a control-console interface will combine to shorten procurement cycles for 1city.biz users, Granata believes.