The Supply Chain Management (SCM) suite is a set of web-based applications which enable trading partners to work co-operatively in the space between their own back-office systems. Each module can be licensed separately for use, and enables you to share information in a secure way with your trading partners or to view (and if desired, import into your system) information which they have made available to you.

The current modules are:

Price Manager: enabling the sharing of price lists and price change proposals

Inventory Manager: enabling the sharing of quantities of product stocks in different locations

Transport Manager: enabling the weights of delivered loads and new delivery opportunities to be shared

 Code Manager: enabling pairs of trading partners to align their product codes and delivery address codes prior to engaging in electronic document exchange

All of these applications are hosted by F4F in their secure data centres and communicate with the eHub by means of the HUB Gateway.

Information can be fed to these applications directly from a sender’s IT system via the F4F eHub in the normal way. As well as sending the information itself, the sender can prescribe exactly who is allowed to view the data and for how long it is to remain published.

For those who are viewing the information, access to all the modules for which they have subscribed is provided via a single logon and password. Senders can be alerted to any information which is changed via one of the modules by means of an e-mail being sent from the website to the sender of the information.

F4F’s OCR is tightly linked into our OCR Gateway to provide a full Electronic Document Capture service. Together, these two components of the B2B Platform enable us to deliver to your back-office system everything you need to be able to process data from paper or image sources.

The most common document types we process by this means are Purchase Orders and Invoices, and the most common sources are:

• Faxes sent either manually or via software such as Zetafax (of course, they must not be handwritten, as our OCR Engine is not a handwriting recognition tool)
• PDF files 
• Paper documents, scanned either by your company or by F4F on your behalf, and sent to the OCR Engine by e-mail or via FTP, for example.

On receipt of the image, we check its source and apply a set of pre-prepared rules, which have been developed with your help to locate and extract the key data items from the document.

We can then turn the data extracted from the source image into the exact file format that you receive from others, and which you can import into your back-office system.
In addition, we can send you the original image as well, in a file named according to the sender and the document number, so that your staff can store it locally and access it subsequently should the need arise.

And if there is a problem in interpreting any of the data items on the source image, we apply rules to send you an e-mail alert, inviting you to visit a website where you will be able to see both the image itself and the data extracted from it. Any areas of doubt are highlighted, so that you can work quickly with the sender to resolve any ambiguity and have the document forwarded on to your IT system as normal.

F4F recognises that other document exchange Hubs and Services exist in related industries or for specific functions, and that some of your trading partners might already be connected to them. F4F’s philosophy is to create an “open” trading environment, which does not prevent its members from exchanging documents with their trading partners because of they are already connected elsewhere. On the contrary, F4F has already created links with several such Hubs and is in the process of developing more. This way you can have the peace of mind that your investment in F4F will not become a technical “cul-de-sac”.