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In the wake of Ford and General Motor's decision to merge their fledgling supply chain portals, Elizabeth Bellamy asks: what happened to competitive advantage?
The European Commission has proposed that all European Union countries must recycle 55-70 per cent of their packaging by 2006. But the commission’s recommendations carry no legal compulsion for firms to be responsible for the recycling of the packaging they produce.
Hunter Davies
HarperCollins, £14.99
Rating: 4/5
UK software firm CI Solutions has acquired the global patent for electronic data interchange (EDI) documents to be sent over an open network. The global market for EDI, the standard technology used to send information and complete transactions securely online, is worth an estimated £47 billion. Tens of thousands of firms use the technology, said CI’s managing director, Jonathan Palmer.
Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has outsourced its IT to IBM for £1.2 billion, one of the drugs industry’s largest IT contracts. The 45-country deal includes PC desktop support, helpdesk services, intranet, e-mail and servers. Notably, activities to remain in-house are production and research information. Around 1,200 IBM employees could be transferred.
Industry groups have welcomed a survey released this month into “cabotage” - the practice of foreign hauliers operating entirely in the UK - which shows that such operators have less than 1 per cent of the haulage business in Britain.
Balfour Beatty has been named as a preferred bidder for a £200 million scheme to expand London’s rail network. For the Thameslink 2000 project, the construction company will design and install track and power supplies to allow longer trains to run on routes to Peterborough, Guildford and Ashford.
MG Rover Group is hoping to negotiate an early end to royalty payments to Honda on the UK company’s small and medium-sized cars. MG Rover uses the basic platform of the early 1990s Honda Civic car. The contract is to run until 2004 when a replacement for the Rover 45 is due.
The chairman of Land Rover has written to the banks owed money by the car maker’s chassis supplier UPF-Thompson - now in receivership by KPMG - warning against the receiver’s tactics.