Background
As a leading supplier of stationery and office consumables to corporate South  Africa, Waltons is no novice when it comes to participating in e-marketplaces. It  cut its teeth early through its integration with Sasol’s e-marketplace – one of the  first to go live locally in 2000 – and has since become a major supplier to every recognised e-marketplace in the country. But with a core part of Waltons’ overall  revenue being derived from within the local mining industry, high on its list of
priority sites was Quadrem, the Global e-Marketplace™ with a long history of success in the global mining and minerals industry.

Challenge
When Quadrem went live a few years ago, Waltons was swiftly online as one of its ‘anchor-tenant’ suppliers. "We had made the decision early on to play a driving role in every South African e-marketplace in order to better meet the needs of our customers and ensure we retained their business," explains Paul Morel, national e-business manager at Waltons. "Whilst it might be fair to say that we felt some pressure to join up and get online in those early days, the extensive and ongoing business benefits we have derived since then have far outweighed the initial investment. From a Waltons perspective, this ROI has been particularly evident in the case of Quadrem."

Solution
As a supplier into Quadrem, Waltons make extensive use of Quadrem SupplyCentre™, the standard supplier interface into the Quadrem e-marketplace. "As a fully Web-based portal, it allows Waltons to receive and manage all of its orders and invoices through one single application," says Brandon Spear, regional vice president for Quadrem Africa. "This eliminates the hassle and costly inefficiencies of conducting sales via telephone tag, fax marathons and reams of paperwork orders."

Results
Effective order management: Waltons is now able to manage its orders dynamically at one central point, including functions such as order and status changes, order sorting,creation of invoices, and the generation of advanced shipping notices.

• Rapid response: Waltons is able to respond rapidly and directly to the purchase orders it receives, thereby securing the business and entering orders into operations within minutes.
• Flexible acceptance: The flexibility of SupplyCentre™ means that Waltons can deal effectively with orders that contain errors (e.g. incorrect volumes). In its order response, Waltons can simply accept parts of an order, whilst proposing changes to particular line items with queries
• Robust reporting: SupplyCentre™ offers powerful reporting functionality to support fulfilment, billing and logistics. These include personalised views such as all documents associated with a specific order number or all invoices paid and pending, as well as administrative reports on order history.
• Rich buyer directory: Waltons can search the Buyer Directory to view details of all buyers within Quadrem, and SupplyCentre™ even includes pre-formatted e-mails that it can send to prospective buyers.
• Permission-based administration: SupplyCentre™ supports two levels of access for Waltons: general users who perform daily fulfilment, billing and logistics activities; and administrators, who manage corporate information, roles, access, permissions and passwords.
• State-of-the-art security: Quadrem guarantees the security of data within SupplyCentre™. The technology architecture includes firewalls, transaction data is encrypted, and a robust user login authentication process further protects Walton’s data.