RosettaNet Malaysia introduces new biz standard for local SMIs

by Woon Wu Lin

KUALA LUMPUR: Non-profit organisation RosettaNet Malaysia has designed a business-to-business standard called RosettaNet Automated Enablement standard (RAE) to benefit small and medium industries (SMIs) and encourage them to automate their procurement processes.

Its director for Malaysia, Foong Heng Hou, said the RAE provided for a low-cost RosettaNet Implementation Solution for smaller trading partners with the added benefits of accelerated implementation periods and lower investment cost.

Speaking at a media briefing yesterday, Foong said RosettaNet Malaysia had tailor-made a package suitable for Malaysian businesses, and it was a subset of the standards that small businesses could use.

He added that RAE was supported by the Malaysian government and is a 100% error-free forecast-to-cash procurement process that substantially lowers manual transactions and allows for storing and managing of business data in documents.

RAE is a modification of the original Rosetta standard used by multinationals to transact business-to-business documents such as invoices, and was designed through Rosettanet Malaysia's technological collaboration with Microsoft Malaysia using an international open document standard called ECMA Open XML, which is supported by companies such as Apple and Novell.

“Open XML opens up exciting opportunities for RAE-based solutions such as its support for custom defined schemes which facilitate wider success of e-commerce while assuring users of long-term preservation of data,” said Foong.

He said as most SMIs were already using Microsoft applications, the set-up cost and time would be less compared to RM5,000 to RM30,000 previously with a set-up time of three to six months.

Foong said the Small and Medium Industries Development Corporation had a RM5 million grant for any Malaysian company that wanted to implement RosettaNet.

“Interested companies will be funded up to 70% and the remainder will be tax exempted,” he said.

He said as of June 2007, there were 446 RosettaNet users in Malaysia, three quarters of which were SMIs with the majority being high-tech manufacturers and telecommunications companies, adding the number could double by the end of next year.

Foong said globally thousands of companies had implemented the Rosetta standard and estimated transactions have exceeded US$1 trillion (RM3.4 trillion), adding that the next countries to use the RAE would be Japan and Europe due to the large number of SMEs and SMIs operating there.