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The trade ecosystem

In the last decades, companies were focused on process optimization with all existing new possibilities of IT. Vendors of goods tried to increase their sales employing new eCommerce tools, like internet shops. Customers tried to optimize their procurement processes.

The touching point processes between these two natural sides of the trade ecosystem was always only seen from one perspective (sales or procurement). Depending on the customer-vendor relation the stronger side typically dictated how and if IT integration was possible and how it was implemented. Dominating technologies have been up up to now EDI, Shops & Punch-Out catalogs. All these technologies do integrate somehow. Biggerst downside are the low level of cross company process integration and the initally high and then continuous IT spending.

In the last years marketplaces have formed, which outsource the integration cost at the cost of data, which renders both parties (vendors and customers) to give aways business information to third parties, which generally is not desirable!

ZUGSEIL - Integrated eCommerce

Our products are the result of 25 years of research and customer driven innovation. Unlike other competitors we did not focus on the sales side nor on the procurement side, but built products trying to make both sides collaborate fully digitally. By employing the B-Op Technology from 2016 on, products have grown to now offer seamless Plug&Play process digitalization between customers and vendors. This makes the usage of digital marketplaces and/or interface technologies obsolete and therefore means huge IT and HR savings potential to all of our customers.

Our products offer all capabilities known by existing sales and procurement tools enhanced with one major USP – full digital integration at no extra cost. This core USP drives a couple of other USPs which are impossible with existing tools, like dynamic cross-company configurators, cross company personal equipment networks, service supply chains and many more use cases which require full digital integration between companies to function.

These unique selling prepositions unlock supply chain collaboration on an unprecedented level for our customers – the well known Source-To-Pay or Procure-To-Pay procesess are just small fragments of the entire trade ecosystem processing space. Our ZUGSEIL Procurement-Suite offers a totally new approach for procurement tools extending the solution scope with the requirements of the sales perspective into one standardized model. This approach, which we call Collaborative Supply Chain, allows every and each business partner to take their role in dynamically developing supply chains without facing huge investment in IT.

Roles in the Collaborative Supply Chain

The trade ecosystem as a whole has an unlimited number of players, which dynamically form ever adapting supply chains. This constant change process was so far a major challenge to IT coupled with major and constant IT spending. We offer two suites of products dedicated to enable the Collaborative Supply Chain and therefor taking away this pain from your and your partners' organizations!

In essence this means that keeping up-to-date with your ever changing partner-network without the need for costly IT-Interface-projects! It just works "plug-and-play" and will save your organization from huge future invests by saving it from ever returning cross-company digitalization projects.

CUSTOMER Role

The customer role delivers all tools to facilitate all kinds of Procurement processes. The customer role comes with essential packages like ZUGSEIL BEST procurement tools & automation, ZUGSEIL BEST warehousing management, amongst many more.

One of the game changers, which are delivered by the B-Op technology is that shops do no longer reside on the vendor side, but are now on the customer side which provides a couple of major benefits to the customer:

1. The customer has a unified shopping experience, no matter from which supplier goods are procured
2. All data of the shopping process is no longer shared or even in reach for the vendors and cannot be used by vendors to analyze the business or the behavior of the customer, unless the customer explicitly desires this.
3. The customer knows the most about what any why he wants to procure items. This knowledge is typically private and shall or even must not be shared with vendors. If the shop is now on the customer side, these information can be used to provide a superior shopping experience!

You can read up here for futher details on the tools and services of the ZUGSEIL Procurement-Suite product.

VENDOR Role

The vendor role delivers all tools to facilitate all kinds of sales and fulfillment processes. It comes with essential packages like the ZUGSEIL BEST Product Information Management, ZUGSEIL BEST Catalog Management, ZUGSEIL BEST Fulfillment which also includes the ZUGSEIL BEST warehousing management, amongst many more.

You can read up here for futher details on the ZUGSEIL Supplier-Suite product.

ZUGSEIL Products

ZUGSEIL has three levels of products:

• Comfort level products (turquise), which are prebundled and are sold as cloud-service to our customers. They complexity of these products is optimized to work with minimal or no training. In the case that support is required, knowledge can be acquired through the internet.
• Sport level products (green), which provide unrestricted flexibility with all features of our standard products. Using these products typically goes along with training and regular support which are provided by our project partner companies, like m-pioneers.com.
• Racing level products (yellow), which mean that the customer wants to go to the edges of our product (and beyond). We depend on customers in this mode, as customer-driven innovation was always the key to our success. Running projects in this mode is always associated with direct collaboration with us and one of our project partners.

Please contact us for further information.

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 communication 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

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.