Business Is Bigger, and Different, But Is It Better?


To put it plainly, the Internet has changed everything, and the way companies do business continues to change quickly. The roles of supplier, customer, and distributor have blurred. Competition is increasing and the nature of that competition is changing. Customers are becoming more demanding and less loyal at the same time. The pace of change has picked up to what is now called "Internet time." And the scale, scope, and potential payoff have grown along with the complexity and risk. Any e-business solution, especially a specification for exchanging messages, needs to address these metrics and conditions.

The growing realization of companies[6] that e-business covers more than just taking orders reflects an important change in recent months. Conducting business means meeting the total needs of customers. Delivery, service, payments, maintenance, warranties, and financing play significant roles in business decisions, and businesses need to configure their systems to support these functions as well as sales. Combining these functions into business processes provides ways of identifying series of related transactions, and illustrates the need for flexibility in systems and databases to move data among them.

Much of the commerce generated over the 20th century was based on stable supply chains, dictated in many respects by the needs of the producers . In the 21st century, customers now are empowered by information. Earlier, the suppliers produced the goods and services but also managed the flow of information about these goods and services. Intermediaries such as salespeople or wholesalers provided information about product characteristics, warranties, servicing , and status of deliveries. Now companies use the web to provide this kind of information, not only for retail customers but for all supply-chain partners . Customers now demand instant access to this information via a web browser, not from a telephone call.

With more information at their fingertips, customers can force suppliers to provide information on goods and services in the way that customers want to see it, not the way producers want to present it. A few years ago, only publications such as Consumer Reports provided apples-to-apples comparisons of products and services. Now, web-based services compete with each other to present these kinds of details on an expanding array of items. Producers have long resisted this process of commoditizing, but the web has made it routine. Both consumer and business customers want more choices, more channels, and more options before they spend their money.

The need to provide more choices has forced businesses to work in different ways with competitors and customers. The days of stable supply chains meant working with the same suppliers and distributors from one year to the next . You knew the competition, and they knew you. Now we see more coopetition, where companies partner with competitors on short- term projects when business opportunities arise. Companies move into new lines of business faster than before, either when new opportunities arise or as a result of mergers.

Even with the economic slowdown in the first half of 2001, the volume of e-business continues to grow over previous years. In many respects, the growth of business-to-business transactions remains as strong as ever, as companies continue to invest in systems to coordinate their activities with trading partners.While consumer sales over the web may have moderated somewhat from the torrid pace of 1999 “2000, the market research company Jupiter Media Metrix still expects business-to-business trade to grow past the $6 trillion dollar mark by 2005.[7]



ebXML. The New Global Standard for Doing Business Over the Internet
ebXML: The New Global Standard for Doing Business on the Internet
ISBN: 0735711178
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 100

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