Mission
The project aims at creating a Newco, which will provide the “Mercury Service” (this is a provisional code name). The service is intended for a primary target, i.e. the segment that includes small and medium sized companies. By acting as a B2B Service–HUB, the service will automate the flow of administrative documents between/among the subscriber organizations.
Principles
The Mercury Consortium is going to operate according to a principle that reverses two paradigms:
- from a new specific software, which is usually imposed (mostly unsuccessfully) by a third party and has to be adopted by all the companies that operate B2B in order to interact with a digital and structured procedure
to a new “Mercury Service enabled” version of the same accounting/ERP system that is already installed and used by the companies: as no new application software is necessary the direct and indirect costs for companies will be reduced - from the traditional design in laboratory, which has to be promoted in the market with substantial investments
to a proactive involvement of clients, who are the future users of the solutions, in order to introduce, starting from the preliminary design, those characteristics that allow the maximum effectiveness of the final solution
Goals
The “Mercury Service” will allow a transformation in the exchange of documents from a current procedure that is, most of the time, either in analogue form or, in any case, unstructured and in peer-to-peer modality to a procedure that is completely digital, structured and based on a secure and reliable B2B Service–HUB model that is based on consolidated technological–application standards for inter-operability.
The “Mercury Service” will allow the subscriber companies to drastically reduce the direct and indirect costs related to the management of administrative documents in the daily B2B relations. The organizations may operate in the same system, such as a supply chain, a productive district, a franchising system, but also those that operate in various supply chains and districts may profit from extraordinary advantages.
The key factors in the service provided are the flexibility, the absence of invasive elements towards the client organizations, the complete openness towards integrations, verticalisations and specific developments that clients need to apply either directly or through ICT operators (ISVs, System and Application Integrators).
Target market
The target market for the “Mercury Service” is the segment that includes small and medium sized companies. This is an area with high potential because it is still practically controlled by analogous and/or digital forms of B2B interaction. It is unstructured, EDI and Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions have not really been applied yet, except in very few contexts where a single big company in a supply chain has fixed (has managed to fix) rules, processes and B2B languages choosing the products and technical solutions that the other actors in the supply chain have to buy in order to communicate with the leader.
The solutions that are present in the market usually have a custom/amateurish dimension. They are always based on proprietary models/architectures/solutions, which are often developed ad hoc depending on the client's (both single or groups) needs, without a real openness to the market even though sometimes technological XML standards are adopted.
Most of the time, those who supply this kind of solutions do not have the business models, the go-to-market capability and the financial means that allow them to go beyond the niche dimension. They cannot reach the scale level that is necessary to impose their solutions as common standards, but an UTILITY SERVICE like the “Mercury Service” aims at attaining all of these qualities.
Roadmap
A consortium (“Consortium Mercury”) has been set up in order to aggregate the leaders of the Italian software and services industry. The aims of the consortium are to lay the foundations of the project and to gather the financial resources reported in the business plan.
Once these goals are achieved, the “Mercury Consortium” will be transformed into a limited company, i.e. the Newco that will provide the “Mercury Service”.
The “Mercury Consortium” statute provides for the participation of the industrial and financial investors in the Newco, i.e. the limited company into which the consortium will be transformed.