Supply Chain - Manufacturing & Distribution

Microsoft Business Network

Professional Services Automation

CRM

Analytics & Business Intelligence

Business Performance Measurement

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Build a trading community

How closely does your business work with your suppliers and customers? With Microsoft Business Network, you can start building your own close-knit community of trading partners. Your systems and people can start to work more smoothly with those inside your customers' and suppliers' businesses. Everyone within the trading community saves time and money and works together more efficiently.

Get Started Quickly and Easily

Start building your community by creating simple Microsoft Excel 2003 lists of customers and suppliers. Then use Microsoft Business Network's Web-based tools to upload those lists and create an online directory of all your key business partners. From this directory, you can invite different partners to participate in a new Microsoft Business Network trading relationship.

If you don't feel comfortable developing this online directory and inviting your trading partners, Altara can help.

Manage Your Entire Trading Partner Community

Once your invitations have been sent, use Microsoft Business Network's online tools to track and manage invitations and determine which companies have received and acknowledged them. After a supplier or customer accepts the invitation, they can purchase either Microsoft Business Network Standard Edition or Microsoft Business Network Professional Edition, depending on their specific needs.

Regardless of which Microsoft Business Network edition your partner selects, after they complete their installation they will become a part of your new partner community.

Together you can start using either of Microsoft Business Network's built-in process templates to start streamlining the way you work together. If you choose to customize one of these process templates, you can use Microsoft Business Network's online tools to easily deploy that customized solution to your partners.

Experience Seamless Integration
Once you start using Microsoft Business Network to collaborate with your trading partners, both sides of the relationship start to see immediate benefits:

• Less data needs to be reentered.

• Less time is spent phoning and faxing information.

• Information becomes more accurate.

• Information is exchanged more rapidly.

• Quicker decisions can be made.


Microsoft Business Network helps you seamlessly integrate with your trading partners, while also experiencing heightened integration with your company's business management applications.

By evolving your relationships with your customers and suppliers, all members of the community start to see benefits. You may find you want to extend and grow your community to more trading partners, then see more of your customers and suppliers build their own communities while still participating in yours. Together, trading partner communities can make business more efficient than ever before.

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