Airline imdustry exhange takes top honors with emarketplace solution

Aeroxchange, a business-to-business e-commerce exchange for the aviation industry built on technology from Oracle Corporation, took off with two major awards at the eCustomer World Golden Awards.

The exchange won the Innovative eMarketplace Solution and the Overall B2B Excellence awards.

The awards, which recognize and reward e-business solutions and innovation in the Canadian marketplace, were handed out at a gala dinner at the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre during the eCustomer World 2001 Conference and Exposition.

A total of 21 awards were handed out to end users who have implemented leading-edge customer-relationship management (CRM) and business-to-business (B2B) information-management solutions in the past year.

Jacob Gordon, president of eCustomerWorld Institute and chair of the judging committee, says that the Aeroxchange e-business marketplace solution epitomizes the type of innovative e-business leadership that the judges were looking for.

“The Awards Committee elected to award the Overall B2B Excellence Award to Aeroxchange because the solution demonstrated true commitment on the part of all Aeroxchange members in the creation of an innovative eCommerce marketplace that is transforming the aviation industry.”

The idea for Aeroxchange, which went live last February, originated at Air Canada after the airline determined there might be an opportunity to share costs and rewards of electronic procurement with other airline partners.

From there, 13 global airlines, including Air Canada, went on to develop an e-commerce marketplace designed to improve supply-chain efficiency across the aviation industry.

“The supply chain in the aviation industry is both fragmented and complex,” says Bruce MacCoubrey, vice-president of technical operations at Air Canada, and former Chairman at Aeroxchange. “With Aeroxchange, we saw an opportunity to leverage the Internet to automate procurement operations.

The idea was to reduce transaction costs for both buyers and sellers.”

Now headquartered in Dallas, the company started in October 2000 with 26 employees from 10 of the founding airlines. Working with technology partner Oracle, the company developed and launched its first series of integrated supply-chain management, co-operative purchasing and e-procurement services last February.

Using the Oracle Exchange Marketplace platform, Aeroxchange developed
innovative inventory marketplace services that allow participating trading partners to list and gain visibility to both surplus and allocated inventory stocks of other trading partners. These online services save both time and money in normal and time-critical replenishment situations.

Aeroxchange’s full suite of integrated products allow participants to source and purchase both technical and non-technical products and services using an array of e-commerce transactions, including electronic catalogue-based orders, auctions, reverse auctions, spot purchasing and more.