Strategic partners may be missing. There are technical limits to the amount of data that a B2B exchange can host. If a large retailer wishes to provide supply chain collaboration at a store level on a daily basis, it is currently not feasible to replicate the required data to a B2B exchange. Hub Building and managing a trading partner extranet can be a major undertaking. Products like the Syncra Systems SyncUp hosting service serve as a private B2B exchange.
Partners supply their data, and then users access the service over the web.
For one company alone, well over a terabyte of data could be required in a fully deployed system. No one has implemented CPFR to this level of detail yet, but at least one retailer has already revealed plans to do so. They will connect to partner extra-nets to extract core supply chain data, participate in B2B exchanges to gain access to a community of trading partners, and build a hub that integrates all of this information for the benefit of company users. Even companies that provide rich corporate extranets will want to post summary data on a B2B exchange, so their demand can be included in the network marketplace. Syncra Systems products support all these scenarios to reduce the complexity of de-ployment and increase the ROI of supply chain collaboration.