Engineering E-Marketplace Will Go Live in October

[London, ENGLAND] A worldwide marketplace for
engineered components will go live in October,
its originators Babcock Borsig
AG,
mg
technologies
and SAPMarkets announced Monday.

The new service will be named ec4ec
(e-commerce for engineered components) and made available online
to all companies that wish to participate.

Initially, ec4ec will be a small fish in a big pool,
being used by its founding members — but later attracting
plant engineering and mechanical engineering companies from
a worldwide market estimated to be worth a staggering US $800 billion.

Covering the full sourcing cycle, from specification and design right
through to order processing, ec4ec will help companies to
collaborate on designs while also providing them with the
means to communicate with suppliers.

Karlheinz Hornung, the director responsible for e-business at
chemicals and engineering group mg technologies, said his
company was now entering one of the largest business-to-business
markets on the Internet.

“This new engineering platform, together with our already successful
chemical marketplace, cheop, is part of the mg strategy to realize
the opportunities provided by e-business to increase profits and
market shares,” said Hornung.

Gisbert Ruehl, executive board member at German engineering firm
Babcock Borsig, was equally optimistic, saying that the ec4ec
marketplace will help his company achieve cost savings of
over a hundred million deutschemarks (US $47 million) by 2001.

“In contrast to many catalog-based trading exchanges, this
collaborative marketplace enables participants to purchase
complex parts and obtain services that need significant
collaborative engineering — including the intensive exchange
of technical specifications, CAD models and project data —
which is typical for an industrial company,” said Ruehl.

SAPMarkets, the California-based subsidiary of European
software giant SAP AG,
will provide many of the e-business applications, including
collaborative engineering and project management, tendering
and auctioning, bulletin boards and maintenance of supplier
directories.

SAPMarkets is currently working in partnership with
Commerce One
to develop a solution infrastructure named MarketSet to enable
enterprises across various industries to collaborate via the
Internet.