LloydsTSB commercial banking division has a strategy for growing their business with UK corporates (and specific public sector organisations) by developing and supplying business applications. This is a strategy first developed in 2000 with the launch of the LloydsTSB Marketplace – a business portal providing financial, business and trade facilitation services to their corporate customers over the internet.

The first of these was the availability of an iprocurement capability provided by Oracle’s Exchange service (OEX). This was and is successful in providing e-procurement capability to organisations without the cost of a complex IT software implementation. One of the major benefits of this model is that the catalogues of suppliers’ items are held centrally and maintained by the suppliers themselves - which can be costly for a buyer to try to maintain.

However many organisations require a purchasing application with deeper functionality than Oracle Exchange Marketplace can provide. In these circumstances, LloydsTSB – Vantage in conjunction with Praktis Solutions Limited provides Oracle’s iProcurement ERP system which can be installed at a client site and connected through to the LloydsTSB Portal. This ensures that the supplier catalogues can still be accessed through the LloydsTSB Marketplace, and the corporate gains both the benefit of more functional systems, and does not have the cost of maintaining the catalogues.

This will provide the following capability:

• Through Oracle iProcurement you will be able to search the marketplace supplier catalogues
• Have a requisition approved,
• And the resulting Purchase Order transmitted electronically to the Marketplace for retrieval by the supplier

Click the below diagram to enlarge, for a schematic overview of this architecture.