Here, for your easy reference, is the first part of an article involving one of our favorite stocks:
Tuesday June 16, 9:00 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Wal-Mart Reaches Smaller Suppliers with Harbinger's TrustedLink Express
NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 16, 1998--Harbinger Corporation (NASDAQ:HRBC - news) today strengthened its role as a leading provider of Electronic Commerce services to the retail industry, with the announcement that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., has implemented Harbinger's TrustedLink Express software for automating business transactions with its suppliers that are not currently EDI capable. Wal-Mart will electronically distribute TrustedLink Express to these suppliers from its RetailLink website via the Internet. Those suppliers will then be able to exchange purchase orders and invoices electronically over the Internet. During the next twenty-four months, Wal-Mart plans to roll out TrustedLink Express in several languages to trading partners in all of the countries in which it operates. Today's announcement was made at the Retail Systems '98 Conference and Exposition being held in New Orleans.
TrustedLink Express is an Internet-based client/server system that will enable Wal-Mart to extend its EDI program to its entire trading community without requiring its smaller trading partners to implement EDI translation software. Instead, the suppliers will use the TrustedLink Express Client software, which allows them to receive purchase orders and send back invoices simply by filling out an easy-to-understand form. All required information on the purchase order automatically appears on the invoice, eliminating the errors associated with rekeying data as well as improving the supplier's productivity. With a single mouse-click, the supplier can initiate an exchange of documents via the Internet. The TrustedLink Express Client software communicates via the Web with the TrustedLink Express Server running at Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. The Server is fully integrated with Wal-Mart's existing EDI infrastructure and translation software.
''Wal-Mart has already established EDI relationships with most of our supplier base ..... yada yada yada
-----------
This is the idea. The more the big suppliers can induce, coerce, whatever, even their smaller suppliers to use electronic commerce the more they save ... up and down the line from admin costs to inventory levels to interest costs to space costs to labor costs and on and on.
The more suppliers get involved, the more they will want to receive P.O.s and transmit shipping info and invoices, etc. electronically with other customers, besides Wal-Mart. The more they will save as well. Pretty soon everybody is doing business this way. Hopefully, HRBC will be the (or at least one of the big) common threads running through the whole revolution.
It is such a good idea for the participants that they can well afford to give the software away to the yet-to-be converted suppliers. The more users there are, the more the ones not yet using electronic commerce will fall behind ... technologically. There SHOULD be a tsunami of demand for HRBC EDI enabling products. HRBC is swimming with the current ... that's why I bought the stock. Now I want them to show me some NUMBERS!
|
