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Transform Your Enterprise

The One Network Platform can be used in three major ways. The first way is to use it to support multi-company community processes in a many-to-many network. The second way is to use it to add point applications and capabilities to extend your existing enterprise services. For example, you could use the platform to just add (say) Demand Forecasting capability to your existing supply chain capabilities. The third major way to use the platform is to use it to transform your enterprise, that is the subject we are about to explore.

Well-designed and appropriate I.T. systems have the potential to give a company a significant competitive edge over their competitors.

There have been historically three ways companies have gone about creating these capabilities:

Building the system on their own
Acquiring and integrating multiple Best of Breed Systems
Acquiring an ERP system

Each of these approaches have their own pros and cons.

The first approach has the benefit of allowing companies to build highly differentiated applications. Many companies have taken this approach. This approach often entails high cost to develop and support.

The second approach is to acquire and integrate multiple best of breed systems. This often gives companies the functional differentiation they seek. But this comes at the expense of single-version-of-the-truth and consistency across acquired applications. This lack of single-version-of-the-truth rapidly spirals out of control as the number of applications increase. Systems eventually become unmanageable or cannot achieve the true functional potential. These architectures also become very rigid and difficult to change.

One attempted workaround for this problem has been the emergence of service-oriented or SOA architectures. However, these architectures do not solve the core problem of multiple-version-of-the-truth and data replication. Home grown systems also typically suffer from this problem.

The answer to this problem has often been the ERP. The main advantage of an ERP is that it delivers consistency and single-version-of-the-truth. However, often these ERP’s deliver no true competitive differentiation. Furthermore the enterprise is completely beholden to the ERP vendor to acquire additional functionality.

The One Network platform is a unique platform that provides one way out of these conflicting objectives. It has been designed to provide:

Consistency and Single-Version-of-the-truth like an ERP; along with
An operating system that allows applications to be built on the platform by One Network, third-parties or you.
A process capability called tunable-system-of-control that allows processes to the platform in a phased manner (not a big-bang all-or-nothing approach).

These three characteristics together allow a company to embark on a transformational I.T. strategy with the One Network platform. They get the advantages of being able to build their own highly differentiated applications (if they so desire), pursue a best-of-breed strategy, contract with One Network to build highly differentiated applications or use some of One Network’s highly differentiated applications all without compromising on single-version-of-the-truth.

Contact One Network to learn about case studies where companies are transforming their operations based on the One Network platform.

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