© 2006 IBM Corporation

e-Collaboration Supply Chain Interlock (ESI) The Collaboration Tool of your choice.

March, 2007.

SPEX presentation

E-collaboration Supply-chain Interlock

The e-collaboration tool of your choice © 2006 IBM Corporation22

What is SPEX ?

SPEX or Supplier Part number EXchange is a workflow process to inform suppliers about any change made in the IBM electronic components database.

It was developed by the ESI team to automate an old manual process engineers were using for years. Its simplicity, speed and ease of use, brought substancial gain and reliability in the communication process with suppliers.

Engineers work on a system (eXplore), make adds / changes / deletes and those modifications are then captured to form an input file to the Spex engine, developed under ESI.

The engine was written in Java and use DB2 for data storage.

E-collaboration Supply-chain Interlock

The e-collaboration tool of your choice © 2006 IBM Corporation33

SPEX Macroflow

E-collaboration Supply-chain Interlock

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How does it run ? Every wednesday morning, the SPEX engine runs, collects all

new/modified part numbers from eXplore and compare some key fields with an internal DB2 database, pointing additions/changes. Based on the adds/changes, the system updates DB2 and generates 2 csv (comma delimited) formatted files by supplier, and when done sends an email to any registered user in the database, with an web URL and two csv files attached (for a particular supplier, file1 contains the whole dataset and file2 contains new and/or modified data only).

When suppliers receive the SPEX email, he/she clicks on the web link and send an acknowledgement to SPEX. Also if there is any problem with the attached files, suppliers can report to the SPEX admin for further actions.

On the next week, the whole process starts again and a special program checks if any supplier acknowledged on time, did it late or even did not acknowledge at all. A report is created by council and those non compliant suppliers go to a red section in the report.

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The e-collaboration tool of your choice © 2006 IBM Corporation55

SPEX mail

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SPEX csv file sample

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Usage statistics report (by week, council )

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SPEX Acknowledgement captured

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3 weeks summary showing non compliant suppliers in 2 or more weeks

© 2006 IBM Corporation

Thank you

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