E-epoxy.com, a website created by Dow Chemical for buyers of epoxy and related products, has named John Everett, who has been handling product marketing, as its new head. He succeeds founder Ian Telford, who will move back to the "real economy" and become global business director for epoxy specialties and monomers at Dow. "Unfortunately, as I leave the e-commerce world, I will have to revert to wearing a tie for the first time in two years," Telford says in a posting on the site. "Hopefully this will not choke my creativity in the new job!" Dow launched the site early last year as a no-frills, self-service marketplace for the low-price segment of the epoxies market. It also offers products from Dow Corning and hopes to sign up other suppliers. 

ChemDeals has partnered with ChemicalAnalysis.com, a portal for chemical analysis services on the Internet. ChemDeals is a marketplace for chemical industry professionals wanting to trade surplus industrial chemicals, specialty chemicals, and other raw materials. Users now can access and obtain quotes for testing services through the ChemicalAnalysis site. For a fee, they can also register as a testing services provider and receive requests for analysis.

BioStreet's assets have been acquired by Burrill & Co., a San Francisco-based life sciences merchant bank headed by G. Steven Burrill, one of the founding investors of BioStreet. Burrill & Co. will add the online marketplace for biopharmaceutical dealmaking to its strategic partnering and spin-out services. BioStreet's DealXchange website showcases technologies and products for potential partners. It was designed to streamline a process that typically takes 12 to 18 months offline. In 2001, BioStreet reported that more than 350 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including all of the top 20 revenue-producing drug development companies, were using DealXchange.

Omnexus, a products and services marketplace for the plastics industry, has enhanced its online ordering system in response to user feedback. To speed up the process, the site has reduced the number of screens that users must view. Order input is now faster, Omnexus reports, and, once ordering preferences and other required information have been registered, trained users can conduct transactions in as little as 30 seconds with immediate order confirmation. Omnexus cites a recent report from market research firm Aberdeen Group estimating that a midsized company can save $2 million per year by switching to online procurement.

Chemcentral has launched a new website, Chemcentral Online, that replaces its old site and incorporates online purchasing functions previously offered on its eFodia.com site. The old Chemcentral site offered product and company information, whereas eFodia allowed for online ordering. The chemical distributor believes that a single site will make life easier for its customers. Users can reach the eFodia marketplace of more than 8,000 chemical products through a "Buy Products" link on every Chemcentral screen. Chemcentral has preserved user registrations and account information in the transfer. Products and services from other eFodia business partners are also still available.

Rooster.com has shut down operations, saying it was "unable to secure additional funding in this tough economic climate." It had more than 30,000 registered users. The original founders--which included Cargill, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, Louis Dreyfus Corp., and IMC Global--launched the agricultural e-marketplace in spring 2000. In February 2001, Rooster.com merged with Pradium, an online agricultural commodities marketplace backed by many of the same firms. At the time, the combined company said investors had provided a total of $70 million in funding.

 
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Companies

DSM has completed the first transaction through its new online storefront, which is a significant part of its corporate e-business platform. Internatio N.V., a major European distribution partner, ordered products online from DSM's coating resins business. The automated transaction was fed directly into DSM's back-end computing system. DSM has been gaining experience through e-business pilot programs over the past 18 months, and some of its units already handle as much as 15% of their sales online. DSM envisions that, in 2003, it will conduct and support a "significant percentage" of its activities through Web-enabled tools.

Sasol North America, formerly Condea Vista, has joined chemical marketplace ChemConnect specifically to conduct e-commerce transactions with Lubrizol. The two companies will connect through ChemConnect's networking hub and use XML-based standard documents for chemical industry transactions. Sasol says it has automated systems for sending the XML documents through the site without manual intervention. Lubrizol has been a ChemConnect member for the past 18 months.

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SERVICES

Sequencia has released an expanded version of its processPoint software for the process industries. The product life-cycle management software includes workflow and product data management capabilities to help R&D efforts. The company says users can accelerate product development with features that allow for finding similar "recipes" for modification, identifying substitute materials, and calculating mass balances. The collaborative software also supports product development needs such as data sharing, stage-gate process management, life-cycle tracking, packaging material and process development, and manufacturing capability modeling. It can be used within an enterprise, with supply-chain partners, or as part of a private trading exchange. The software is completely Internet-based and uses XML-based interfaces to make information widely accessible.

E-Business is written by  Ann Thayer ,who can be reached a_thayer@acs.org

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Copyright © 2001 American Chemical Society

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