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Sandvik Group

Sandvik Coromant and IBX enter a collaborative commerce project together with AB Volvo by utilising web service technology

Sandvik Coromant is the international leader in cemented carbide cutting tools but also recognized to be a leader in B2B and especially interoperability.

In August 2002, Sandvik received an international prize from Microsoft indicating this status. Web Services within Sandvik Coromant is not a new phenomenon, it has existed for three years to integrate internal systems but not known by the name of Web Services until now.

Sandvik Coromant currently has a Web Service pilot project ongoing with IBX* and AB Volvo to utilise Web Services and the technologies implemented by Sandvik Coromant. This is called Collaborative Commerce and symbolises the commercial relationships carried out over a collaborative framework to integrate Sandvik Coromant's and AB Volvo's business processes, show logistics data, share customer relationships and manage knowledge across enterprise boundaries, all this in real-time using Web Services.

Sandvik Coromant has built the foundation for eBusiness relationships on Web Services as a core integration engine to deliver seamless process integration and seamless customer satisfaction. Compared to previous stages of B2B, client server or mapping between XML schemas, Sandvik Coromant considers Web Services to be the best future means of communicating in real-time extending their relationships. The technology has mainly been used internally within Sandvik Coromant but the company is now seeking external partners to integrate businesses via Web Services.

Web services have a good deal of development ahead of them but those who find success using Web services will be those who understand the technology fundamentally: its motivations, the reasons why some components are winning out over others, and the likely course of maturity. The major benefit Sandvik Coromant sees is the reuse of existing Web Services and the increased speed of integration giving significant cost savings.

* IBX is one of the most powerful business-to-business exchange in northern Europe. It was founded in 2000, and is owned by SEB, Ericsson, b-business partners and Novo Nordisk. The exchange, which was launched in October 2000, gathers and integrates sellers and buyers that seek to make their business transactions more efficient and cost-effective on the Internet.