May
5, 2000
TRADINGPRODUCE.COM FILES PATENT IN TECH BREAKTHROUGH
Innovative System Enables Product Code Translation
Between Buyers and Sellers
LIVERMORE,
Calif.-Proving once again it is the innovative leader in on-line trading
for the food and agriculture industries, tradingproduce.com has developed
breakthrough technology that enables its web site to match product codes
between buyers and sellers through an algorithmic matching system.
The
world's premier business-to-business e-commerce site for produce, meat,
seafood, floral, and food and beverage transactions has filed a patent
for the system developed by its team of in-house engineers.
"Our
system acts as a gateway, which, in reality, is a translator of the two
heterogeneous codes," said Zia Zahiri, tradingproduce.com's chief technical
officer. "Through our system, we allow individual translation of buyers'
and sellers' product codes at the site so they can be automatically matched
for like products.
"Unlike
mapping techniques which requires intense catalog management and change
management, our code generation technique translates each set of codes
and there is no need for mapping. Two systems can communicate with each
other if, and only if, they can understand each other's scheme. Currently,
an EDI standard facilitates such mapping and communication. However, EDI
technique is unique for each customer's product code, which adds to overall
EDI integration time and cost.
"We
have appreciated and realized the difficulties and magnitude of this problem
from the beginning and we were set to come up with a solution. I didn't
think we could embark into any back office integration without understanding
of the fundamental code structure and its unification. We believe in-house
development is the only way to address this complicated industry and you
can only excel if you listen hard to your customers and understand their
needs."
Buyers,
including wholesalers, distributors and retailers, each have their own
set of product codes. Likewise, sellers have yet a different set of codes
for the same products. Matching them up so the buy/sell transactions can
be completed with the utmost speed and efficiency is no longer a dilemma.
"This
is a major breakthrough in technology," said tradingproduce.com CEO Rob
Bonavito. "We've focused on solving one of the most difficult technical
challenges facing the produce industry without compromising our customers'
unique product codes. Our mission is clear to make our site easy to use,
simple and extremely reliable."
This
latest innovation comes on the heels of tradingproduce.com's creation
of its back office integration group that focuses on providing its customers
with a streamlined paperless workflow environment.
tradingproduce.com
has also eliminated transaction fees for all five of its divisions, including
the parent site as well as TradingMeat.com, TradingFish.com, TradingFloral.com
and TradingFoodandBeverage.com.
Throughout
the five divisions, members have access to thousands of growers and suppliers
with real-time market prices and both private-contract and open-market
buying and selling. Once a transaction is completed in any of the five
divisions, members have instant communication with the transportation
industry available, including truck, air, rail, freighter and sea.
The
powerful business-to-business e-commerce site is a privately held company
backed by the $550 million investment fund Bay Isle in San Francisco,
Silicon Valley private investors and vTraction, an affiliate of Rabobank
International with $290 billion in assets.
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