Operating a global supply-and-demand chain is becoming increasingly complex as companies face a wider range of requirements from trading partners, find themselves working with suppliers and customers in more territories and have to react to greater diversity in operational and technical capabilities within their trading partner communities. A company's ability to manage and benefit from the complexities of today's value chains is a critical factor in its success. However, achieving critical business objectives can be difficult enough without the constant concern of configuring, monitoring and managing B2B e-commerce systems.
The benefits that can be achieved from standard B2B e-commerce solutions include cost efficiencies, improved quality for products and services, greater visibility into every part of the supply chain with minimal effort, and a streamlined supply chain by cutting out unnecessary delays. With improved access to demand and forecasting data, trading partners can hold optimal levels of stock while still improving on-time delivery metrics.
By providing the right information quickly, without error and without the need to re-key data, employees spend less time sorting out incorrect transactions and staff can be redeployed to tasks that differentiate a business from its competitors. With the help of B2B e-commerce solutions, a business can become more agile—able to grow rapidly without back-office operations becoming a bottleneck and able to change processes easily and quickly to meet new customer demands.
Yet research1 shows that many companies struggle to achieve these benefits. Many have automated B2B processes with a few key trading partners but have difficulty in rolling out the same solutions to a critical mass of suppliers or customers. That means that they are still conducting business through manual processes—by phone, fax, or e-mail—reducing business process visibility, data integrity and traceability while adding significant costs and complexity.
Even where companies have automated B2B processes, they can struggle to handle the proliferation of B2B technical standards used in B2B e-commerce—i.e., partners using different standards or different versions of the same standard. The problem is particularly acute for companies with global supply chains—those who have diverse partners and those who provide products to multiple industry sectors, each of which may have its own set of industry-specific standards. Companies with global supply chains, trading with partners in different countries, need to support different local regulations and laws, communicate in multiple languages, and handle cross-border issues, such as appropriate customs documentation.
