Chemetall Trusts in B.I.P.
crossgate takes over the management of EDI transactions with all of Chemetall’s business partners
Starnberg, 3 May 2007 – Chemetall, a global company concerned with specialist chemistry, recently entrusted its electronic communication to crossgate, the specialist in cross-company data exchange. With its new service provider to support it in the EDI field, Chemetall is now ideally prepared to cope with the challenges of the future and will be able to link up new partners and customers very quickly. The tried-and-tested technology that the Business Integration PlatformTM (B.I.P.) employs and numerous successful projects that crossgate conducted in the automotive sector and the chemical industry were key factors in Chemetall’s decision to work with crossgate.
Rigorously conducted electronic data interchange (EDI) is of vital importance to Chemetall since it has a network of approximately 40 subsidiaries and shareholdings in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia and Africa in addition to its headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. The majority of these corporate sites have their own production facilities and many of them have their own research labs as well. This decentralised organisational structure ensures that each of the local companies is capable of reacting to custome requirements quickly and flexibly in its own market. The subsidiaries can also draw on the whole Group’s resources if necessary. Chemetall’s focus is on products and processes used in the chemical treatment of metal surfaces and plastics and in specific areas of fine chemistry. The company has been part of Rockwood Holdings, Inc. since August 2004.
Chemetall had needed to look for a new EDI solution in order to reduce the amount of internal resources required for EDI without increasing its operating costs. At the time, crossgate had developed an on-demand service in which data transfer was charged on a per-transaction basis. It employed its Business Integration PlatformTM for the purpose of exchanging information, and this not only contained a wide range of standard EDI interfaces but over 18,000 business profiles as well. By choosing this model, Chemetall does not have to pay separately for linking up additional partners and customers, but just for the volume of data actually transferred.
“Our decision to choose crossgate’s service is an investment in the future because we’d like to make the area of EDI more professional and don’t wish to be limited by our own capacity. This is something that a company that specialises in EDI can do much more effectively. We’re now starting to transfer our current business relationships to B.I.P. step by step and are going to link up all of our new partners and customers directly via the platform from now on. In the medium term, this will not only reduce the amount of resources we use internally in the IT sector, but we’ll also benefit from using a business model that’s considerably cheaper to operate,” says Dr. Jürgen Overfeld, CIO at Chemetall.
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