Auction FAQ
 
 
 
     
 

What is Medi-Exchange Auction Services?

Medi-Exchange Auction Services is designed to flexibly allow automated real-time bidding for your existing procurement or liquidation processes. Medi-Exchange Auction Services supplies businesses with a fully hosted solution and provides you with administrative capabilities to control the data and the bidding process. It enables businesses to conduct online dynamic exchanges of products and services with their suppliers, their channel partners and their customers. This Medi-Exchange Auction service is available on Medi-Exchange portal.


What is Dynamic Exchange?

A dynamic exchange is an online interaction where buyers and sellers are able to arrive at an optimum price for each particular business transaction. It has emerged as a powerful new tool for building online bidding forums that help companies generate incremental revenue or cost savings. In fact, many believe that online auctions are the next major development in harnessing the power of marketplace dynamics in real-time to achieve higher profits and improve efficiency.


How will my corporation benefit from using Medi-Exchange Auction Services?

Medi-Exchange Auction Services provides you with an easy solution for the liquidation and procurement negotiation process. Instead of purchasing products and services at fixed prices from your suppliers, or selling off your excess inventory, Medi-Exchange portal creates a more efficient online environment where buyers and sellers can arrive at an optimum price for each "exchange," with minimal up-front investment and fast implementation times. Medi-Exchange Auction Services helps you save valuable time by automating administrative tasks associated with negotiations, increase speed of transactions, get better prices, and generate new revenue channels from existing and new customers by capturing the true market value of everything from scarce goods and services to excess/obsolete inventories.


Describe an example of a corporation using Medi-Exchange Auction Services for their procurement process.

Medi-Exchange Auction Services simplifies and automates the negotiation process for corporate buyers to establish true market prices for goods or services purchased. The real-time bidding process created results in significant cost reductions in purchasing.

Automotive Industry Scenario:
Your manufacturing operations rely on a massive supply chain for the procurement of individual automotive parts used in building cars. When your latest design model calls for a new CV axle, you look to your trusted suppliers for bids. Traditionally, that would entail a time-consuming and costly RFP and review process via fax, telephone, or one-to-one EDI systems. With Medi-Exchange Auction, you would be able to send out an RFP electronically to your entire network of trusted suppliers and within hours, receive bids for supplying the parts, and make arrangements for delivery. With Medi-Exchange Auction, you have control of purchasing criteria for those instances when distribution, financing or other terms outweigh the lowest price.


Describe an example of a corporation using Medi-Exchange Auction Services to liquidate excess inventory

Medi-Exchange Auction Services facilitates a better return on your dollar in excess/obsolete inventory disposal by automating the process and providing support for real-time bidding. This allows companies to change or create new strategies for inventory disposal, eg: from liquidators to channel, or to new markets.

Computer Industry Scenario:
Your company sells nationally known computer peripheral products. A new 17" computer monitor model is to be launched in less than a month. The price of the new model is $100 less than a similar current 17" model that is on the market. There are about 300 units of the current model in your own inventory that need to be sold before the new model can be introduced. Traditionally, you would call several of your distributors or computer hardware liquidators to sell the end-of-life inventory, which is typically a time-consuming and costly process for disposing of inventory. There is also high potential for channel conflict with lower liquidation pricing versus the current street price. With Medi-Exchange Auction Services, you would be able to turn your inventory quickly and profitably. Within a matter of hours, you can have all 300 monitors or any portion posted on your business-to-business Channel Partner Web site and have bids coming in from your first-tier distributors by the end of the business day. Depending on the results, you can quickly and easily expand the particular offering to other channels. You can specify the starting bid price, bid increments, quantity and sales format, and auction runtime. .


What kinds of companies use Medi-Exchange Auction Services solutions?

Corporations seeking to incorporate dynamic exchanges into their business model. Medi-Exchange Auction Services helps to reach new customers, reduce operating costs, and provide another channel of distribution. These companies use Medi-Exchange to introduce competitive market pricing into supplier and customer relationships, and to reduce the time and cost associated with current fax, email and phone-based price negotiations.


What makes Medi-Exchange Auction Services different from the competition?

Medi-Exchange offer comprehensive auction services which is fully integrated with a commerce portal, providing global reach for supplier sourcing. Medi-Exchange Auction Services, powered by SESAMi.com, is also the only offering in the market today with multi-currency and local time zone support for multinational e-commerce. Medi-Exchange Auction Services allows you to have full control over where inventory goes, who buys, and how much competitors can see. Medi-Exchange's Auction Services future direction includes support for Exchanges Ð shipping and handling costs, plug in financing partners, currency conversion etc. The future integration with Medi-Exchange's e-procurement solution completes the e-commerce solution by supporting sourcing of new suppliers and buyers and automating the buying and selling process.


What are some examples of Auction applications?

The following are examples of potential auction applications:

  • Shipping and Trucking - shortages or oversupply of container or trailer space.
  • Warehouse space - shortages or oversupply of warehouse space.
  • Perishable Goods - surpluses of perishable agricultural products or other food items.
  • Chemicals - the procurement or sale of chemicals for industrial use.
  • Travel Industry - time sensitive inventory such as hotel rooms, airline seats, cruise ship tickets,time shares, tour space.
  • Entertainment Industry - time sensitive events such as concerts, sports events, etc.
  • Real Estate - residential and commercial transactions such as lease space and homes.
  • Insurance Services - employee insurance services to corporations.
  • All Manufacturing Industries - off-grade or surplus goods, particularly those needing warehousing.
  • Financial services - commodities, bonds and private stock exchanges, along with related arbitrage markets.
  • Foreign currency, with related arbitrage markets.
  • Advertising space and time (print, TV and radio, outdoor, World Wide Web).


Will I be able to customize Medi-Exchange Auction Services with my existing "company way"?

Yes, Medi-Exchange Auction Services can be customized and adopted to fit and to improve your companyÕs processes without much effort. Medi-Exchange provides many ways of customizing its content and appearance to fit into your company's overall Web presence. Even non-technical employees can set up items for auctions, define win parameters, and customize the application to meet the look and feel requirements of the organization through easy-to-use wizards.


What level of security does Medi-Exchange Auction Services provide?

Medi-Exchange Auction Services supports all three different aspects of security that are critical to a mission-critical application, including proper authentication of registered users; encryption of secure data during transmission; and controlled access to the data to the authenticated users. Medi-Exchange supports the use of SSL technology for tight security and data encryption. In addition, the system provides full control to the administrator to manage the users by groups and assign different levels of permissions to different groups based on business rules. Medi-Exchange then makes sure that only the users who have access to certain data can access that data.


What kind of standards does Medi-Exchange Auction Services support?

Medi-Exchange Auction Services is a Web and browser-based solution. It is built completely on open industry standards. The application runs equally well in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator Browsers, providing universal access to the solutions from anywhere in the world.


Does Medi-Exchange Auction Services support different types of auctions?

Yes, you can choose from many auction formats, including:

English auctions: highest bidder wins for forward auctions; lowest bidder wins for reverse auctions

Yankee auction: start from the highest to the lowest and keeps on giving winners to get rid of inventory.
By law have to show quantity.

Sealed bid auction: everything is not disclosed.

Plus many more!


If I only need one application today, such as Forward Auction, can I add more capabilities in the future?

Yes, all of our applications share a common architecture and Web-based user interface. You can seamlessly add applications as your company expands its uses of online trading, without retraining employees and customers, and without further integration effort.


How will my suppliers get access to my auctions?

Medi-Exchange Auction Services is Internet-ready, requiring only that your trading partners have access to the Internet using a standard Web browser. This means that anyone you allow, anywhere in the world, can immediately join your online marketplace without the need to install and maintain custom software


Can Medi-Exchange Auction Services scale to meet my needs?

Medi-Exchange Auction Services distributed, object-oriented architecture allows marketplaces to run economically on a single server or to scale over many servers to meet the needs of rapidly expanding e-commerce companies. Multi-server set-ups allow the separation of I/O intensive generation and serving of web pages from the time critical functions of running markets so that the marketplace can handle large numbers of users without sacrificing the speed of bid and trade execution. Multi-server set-ups also allow for clustering and fail-over to provide maximum reliability. .


How does Medi-Exchange Auction Services really save time, increase revenue and/or reduce costs?

In procurement:
By increasing the speed with which you obtain materials, components, and services, especially when you are in a hurry or when supplies are difficult to find. By automating the manual tasks associating with creating RFQ/RFP packets and mail/email/faxing it to the suppliers, notifying suppliers over the phone. Normally, such a process means receiving responses, reviewing them, and then negotiating via phone/email/mail/fax -- which can easily take 2-4 weeks. Medi-Exchange Auctions Services can accelerate this process to a few hours or a few days.

In liquidation:
By increasing the speed with which you dispose of goods, so that their value does not decrease.


How much does it cost?

Bidders can participate for free. For originators, there is a one time setup fee, commission fee & monthly subscription fee.

Contact our sales team at sales@medi-exchange.com for more details.


How can I get more information about Medi-Exchange Auction Services?

Contact our sales team at sales@medi-exchange.com.