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ZUGSEIL has specialized in software solutions for ensuring that people are always equipped with the goods they require!

Way more than just a procurement tool!

C parts span over multiple product groups. Especially for simple consumables like office supplies or stationary a simple employee shop integrated with the procurement software can help a lot on optimizing procurement. For the ordering and replenishment of products in these simple product groups good solutions exist many software solutions, called Procure-To-Pay or Source-To-Pay Solutions. Still all of these existing solutions cover only consumables which can be ordered out-of-the-box. Product groups which bear more complexity either on the product side (variants, configurations, individualizations) or having a usage ecosystem (servicing, refurbishing, reuse-scenarios) can only be covered with massive effort by interfacing by other software products made specifically for the management and handling of these product groups.

Examples for product groups are "personal protective equipment (ppe)", "corporate fashion / corporate wear", "Printing/Marketing Material", "Workplace equipment", "Project equipment", "License Management", "Subscription Management"

As a result, many managers were not ready to take the risk to invest into digitalization of these process-ecosystems for 4 main reasons:

a.     the results had no immediate impact on the core business

b.     there were more important processes to digitalize (A&B product category)

c.     high process complexity caused high digitalization cost, which made the ROI of IT projects in this area abysmal.

d.     Data privacy of employee data was not top priority.

Digitalization of C-Parts was not in the focus of management attention and projects in this area were considered unattractive with a bad Return on Invest.

In the last years, the points a and b have changed. Being able to compete in the battle for talent has made c-parts like personal equipment an important success factor, e.g. employees reward being well equipped with higher loyalty Also, ecological and CO₂ footprint have become a significant topic for top level management. As a large fraction of c parts is used by employees, having a grip on the so far unimportant processes is becoming more and more essential.

Also, a data on equipment usage and their current state is required to make correct procurement decisions. All these data are associated with the employee profiles as they and their work are the drivers for c parts usage. Handing out employee data to suppliers and letting them manage the demand, as it was considered good practice in the past, is no good option anymore. As a result of all these changed circumstances, the proper management of c parts is having a big impact on all of these issues - making it more and more onto the top management agendas!

Most companies are overwhelmed by the complexity of c-parts management. They have tried to cut down complexity to the mere procurement processes as no appropriate tools were available handling the full process ecosystem. This happened typically through usage of standard Procure-to-Pay (P2P) or Source-To-Pay (S2P) tools.

ZUGSEIL has invested over the last 25 years to make full digitalization of all processes in these product groups simple and affordable. Our products integrate nicely with existing ERP-Environments and help their users to dramatically cut down IT cost in the procurement business domain. Also, ZUGSEIL is based on the b-op platform, solving all the data privacy issues by design and bringing the capability of free full supply chain integration.

Products

The ZUGSEIL Supply Chain Solutions AG company offers products under various brands, which are all fully compatible as being based on the b-op technology.

ZUGSEIL Brand

The ZUGSEIL brand is the area from which we originate - the corporate wear industry. Corporate wear comes with complex products and highly specific business processes, which bring a lot of sophisticated on the customer side as well as on the supplier side. Exactly for catering these highly complex business processes which require strong collaboration (and therefore deep digital integration) between suppliers and customers, we have developed two standard products, which can be easily on-boarded through our website and free online training courses:

• ZUGSEIL BEST - for the customer side, which has to equip their employees with corporate fashion or ppe
• ZUGSEIL Supplier Cloud - for the supplier side, which has to integrate with the customer side and deliver products and services to them.

McPurchase brand

Although having started as specialty solutions for corporate fashion and personal protective equipment (ppe) which are sold under the ZUGSEIL brand, we have learned that it is easier for our solutions which are built for solving complex procurement issues of our customers to solve simple procurement issues, rather than the other way around when using standard P2P or S2P solutions.

Therefore we have created a set of tools similar to ZUGSEIL products, but stripped from all the specifics of textile procurement and there therefore even easier to adopt for our customers.

• McPurchase Employee Portal - a standardized tool for allowing internal ordering and procurement automation
• McPurchase Supplier Cloud - a standardized tool for the supplier side, allowing hassle free onboarding and general tasks of suppliers

Confide brand

One of the early research focus was mass customization which is part of our DNS. As a result we have the Confide brand, which allows the standardized creation of configurator solution spaves and propagation of these solution spaces in b-op catalogs. This unique feature-set is sold as an extension to all products of the other brands

• Confide Design Studio - an extension package for the supplier side bearing a full configuration product with solution space designers

Advanced Trade Sphere Tools (ATST) brand

Finally as we have been encountering more and more special requests by customers along our journey, we have developed a more abstract and thus powerful implementation of our tools which can act as a full peer-to-peer procurement solution. It can be used for supply chain management for all types of products - and of course c parts. Therefore, the tools of ATST are ideal for all organizations which wants to drive their digital business process integration with all partners in their entire trade sphere ecosystem:

Comfort level products (onboarding over a cloud solution possible, reduced complexity)

• [1]ATST Analytics Community - a community for reports available for all products

Sport level products (advanced functionality, requires training)

• ATST Procurement Suite - a full procurement-suite which comes with many advanced functionality for supply chain management
• ATST Supplier Suite - a full suite for handling most of the supplier tasks required for integration with the customers

Performance level products (top notch functionality, project management and training required)

• ATST B2B Shop - an extension package for the supplier side bearing a standard b2b shop (for integration with enterprises which are not b-op based)
• ATST Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - sales funnels, campaign management, sales automation, ...
• ATST Supplier ERP - a full ERP solution for the supplier-side (except book-keeping)

Long story short

When we were asked in 2002 by our first customer to build an employee shop this looked to us like a fairly simple job. We had to learn that this impression was deceiving!

Problems arose when we found that the goods required by staff are often critical to operations or there are legal requirements which make it essential to deeply integrate with suppliers along the supply chains, e.g. in personal protective equipment. Even more complexity injected, when we found that personal equipment in many cases requires a high level of customization of the products (e.g. product variants in corporate wear). When thinking on full digitization of your internal procurement we sometimes even ended up with freely configurable products in the area of personal protective equipment (PPE) or medical supplies for individual employees. Also we had to learn, that many companies have a clear definition who should receive which equipment items at which point in time depending on the activities and regions the employee is active in. In the last years customers more and more are striving to reduce their ecological footprint and company spending by introducing product-lifecycle-tracking for reuse or refurbishment cycles of equipment.

All these issues were not clear at the beginning of our journey but have brought us to the point that we can now offer a merely complete set of tools which go far beyond the regular purchasing scope offered by other systems.

b-op

Over the last 25 years ZUGSEIL has been looking into various product groups and tried to understand the specifics of these, because we have learned early that the full digital dividend will only happen to our customers, when all processes are entirely covered and the interacting parties communicate digitally. Most vendors believe that proper handling of the Procure-To-Pay or Source-To-Pay Processes do the trick, but the real value for our customers requires the entire fulfillment and lifecycle processes of all products to be implemented. With old fashioned systems this takes tons of interfaces, which is very expensive. Most standard-interface-systems like EDI are not even close to being capable of achieving this. So we are very proud to say that we deliver exactly this value with our products being based on the B-Op technology, enabling our customers to fully integrate their processes with all partners in your companies unique ecosystem without huge IT investments to be made.

ZUGSEIL builds products which serve customers active in the Trade Sphere and Employment Sphere. Please click on the provided links to read up further details on how ZUGSEIL supports the business cases in these spheres.

How to read this wiki

This wiki has the intention to deliver an integrated knowledge base to all stakeholders in the b-op tradesphere on the customer as well as our side. Ranging from the users on the client side, sales consultants and implementing project managers from a project partner company to the developers on our own team. We believe that this holistic approach can help for better comunication between all these parties. You can read up in this article on the basic structure of this wiki.

Depending on your role with ZUGSEIL these pages may provide fast access to the desired content: Project Manager Area, Developers Area