Category Archives: B2B 3.0

A Good Supply Chain is Agile … and Powered by B2B 3.0!

Perfect Financial Storm Shutters Suppliers
Communistic Leader Closes Borders
Hurricane Hades Shutters East Coast Port
Toothpaste Terrorizes Teeth … Millions Tainted
Melamine Mauls Mutts … Thousands Dead
Spinach Salmonella Kills Hundreds

How many times have we seen these headlines in recent years? Too Many. How many times in the past year has a crises like this affected your average organization to some degree? At least once … if not twice! Supply chain risks are mounting at an alarming pace, and the average organization now experiences at least once significant supply disruption a year, if not two! And it looks like things are about to get worse. That’s why you need an Agile supply chain, powered by B2B 3.0, if you want to survive the next few years.

What is an Agile supply chain?

Agile has typically been used to refer to agile software development, which is a set of methodologies that promote a hands-on project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaption, a leadership philosophy that encourages close team work, self organization and accountability, engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and goals. (Wikipedia) But the core principles are not restricted to software development … they are equally applicable to supply chain.

An agile supply chain is also:

  • hands-on
    No one in the organization is afraid to get down and dirty and participate in the tactical day-to-day execution to make sure the big-picture strategic plan is realized.
  • driven by cross-functional teamwork
    One person is not a supply chain — and neither is one department. A leading supply management department works closely with logistics, inventory management, operations, engineering, and legal, at a minimum.
  • self-organizing
    A good supply management department is capable of selecting the best strategy and process for each supply chain project.
  • results-driven and accountable
    Supply Management is more then just purchasing … it’s about getting results. The right part at the right price at the right place at the right time, in line with the goals, and contracts, of the department. A good supply management department follows an award from the time of allocation through the final shipment to insure that any identified cost savings and cost avoidance are realized and reported.
  • best-practice focussed
    A good supply management department employs best practices to get the best results it can.
  • quality-centric
    A good supply management department is focussed on quality … and avoiding safety risks that can bring down the company.
  • customer focussed
    A great supply management department is focussed on the perfect order.

Furthermore, an Agile supply chain is powered on B2B 3.0. Why?

  • It Gives You Visibility.
    B2B 3.0 gives you up to date status on every order and let’s you know where it is in the pipeline … allowing you to be hands on.
  • It is Collaborative.
    It allows you to come together with your colleagues in other departments and work as a team.
  • It organizes organizational knowledge.
    Helping your supply management organization to be self-organizing.
  • It tracks all of the relevant information.
    This helps you be results driven and accountable.
  • It’s built on best practices.
    All of your suppliers’ products and services in one easily-accessible and always up-to-date catalogue. Meta-search across your catalog, contracts, and project repository. Industry leading spend analysis for opportunity identification.
  • It’s about quality.
    Not about forcing a square process into a circular whole.
  • It’s about commerce.
    It enables suppliers and buyers, and that’s fundamentally what supply management is all about.

Content Enablement Technologies Enable e-Procurement 3.0

Like it’s predecessors in the series, this latest white paper on how Content Enablement Technologies Enable e-Procurement 3.0 is about B2B 3.0 (Business-to-Business 3.0), the next generation of technology for the enterprise that generates value throughout the supply chain, and how it enables e-Procurement 3.0, which is the only implementation of e-Procurement technology that is guaranteed to deliver maximum value — and savings — to your organization.

As highlighted in the first two white papers in this series, B2B 3.0, which is the first generation of software technology that actually puts business users on the same footing as consumers (who have had “3.0” technologies at their fingertips for years), is the first technology to enable true commerce in the global marketplace. Returning to the fundamentals of e-Commerce, that have been lost for the last decade or so, B2B 3.0 gives us connectivity that is open and free to all, content that is managed once in a non-redundant fashion by the content owner, and an open community where buyers and sellers can come together for short periods of time through virtual networks that allow them to conduct the business they need to conduct — when, and how, they need to conduct it. No “technical” strings attached.

In addition, as highlighted in the second white paper in this series, B2B 3.0 is the first technology to level the playing field between buyers and suppliers and put them both on the same footing. Previous generations of B2B technology focused primarily on the buyer, the target customer, under the fallacy that ‘streamlining’ the process for the buyer would lead to the greatest cost savings. The reality is that this ‘streamlining’ resulted in increased work, and thus increased cost, for the supplier who had to ultimately increase their prices to cover their costs. B2B 3.0 streamlines the process for the supplier and the buyer, resulting in cost and process savings for both parties.

Furthermore, B2B 3.0 goes beyond simply streamlining processes and decreasing work, it also enables content in new and innovative ways which not only enable commerce, but enable one of the cornerstones of business e-commerce — e-Procurement. Unlike traditional e-Procurement solutions, which usually attack procurement in a piece-meal fashion, new e-Procurement 3.0 solutions are integrated commerce solutions that support each step of the various procurement cycles in your organization in a tightly-integrated fashion that seamlessly flow from one step to the next. An e-Procurement 3.0 solution, which integrates the m-way matching that eludes so many traditional piece-meal procurement applications at its core, ensures that the organization only pays for goods and services actually received — and only pays at contracted rates. E-Procurement 3.0 solutions succeed where previous generations of e-Procurement solutions failed because they are enabled by content and content management that was lacking before B2B 3.0 — and this makes commerce truly simple.

To download this paper, and the first two papers in the series, access the following links:

  • Introducing B2B 3.0 And Simplicity For All
  • Simplifying B2B for Suppliers Enables Buyers
  • Content Enablement Technologies Enable e-Procurement 3.0

Web 2.0 is Dead! Good thing B2B 3.0 Takes Business Intelligence Out of IT’s Hands and Into Yours

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is right! Web 2.0 is Dead! Good thing there’s B2B 3.0 to pick up the slack!

Scanning through the past few months of ZDNet’s Tech archives, I came across this commentary by Sid Probstein, CTO of Attivio, one of the many companies popping up in the “semantic web” and “enterprise search” spaces that is likely a competitor to Endeca, a company you’ve probably read about on Spend Matters. While I’m not going to comment on either solution, both of which appear to me to be a merger of traditional OLAP BI engines with better rules engines (which give the user more flexibility in both the definition and application of business rules for data segmentation and reporting), I definitely agree with the premise of the commentary, that IT’s involvement in Business Intelligence (BI) will diminish in time as business users adopt new technologies to quench their thirst for information, and believe that it will happen as these users adopt more and more B2B 3.0 technologies.

I really liked how the article got straight to the point.

Today’s mainstay BI tools are extremely good at tracking raw transactional numbers like sales figures and profit margins. What they fail to adequately address are the root causes, or drivers, of trends in those numbers. Moreover, they are typically able to tell what happened — but not explain why (unless it is evident in some other numeric data), let alone alert the business as a change emerges. … Answering these types of questions with the average BI tool is challenging: at best, it takes a great deal of time to gain even one additional level of insight.

Furthermore,

The cost of these investigations is often high. Large numbers of IT staff must collaborate to extract, transform and load the data into a warehouse, update data dictionaries and then reconfigure the layers of OLAP, summarization, reporting and dashboarding. Despite these efforts and a slew of recent corporate acquisitions, many questions remain beyond the reach of such systems.

Thus,

To provide greater value, BI tools must evolve in two ways. They must enable users to answer deeper … questions about the enterprise. Then they must make it possible for general business users to easily obtain information.

Hear, hear! I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Real BI allows you to aggregate all of the relevant information that you need to make a decision into a single coherent view, just like Vinimaya (rebranded Aquiire, acquired by Coupa) does for procurement professionals who need a single integrated catalog; real BI allows you to build the spend cube you need, on the fly, with derived dimensions, on multiple data sources, in real time, just like you can with BIQ (acquired by Opera Solutions, rebranded ElectrifAI); real BI gives you access to the global trade rules and global trade systems in real time, like Integration Point (acquired by Thomson Reuters); and real BI lets you inspect, classify, and take actions on your transactions in real time based on rules you define, which the new search-based BI engines like Attivio allow you to do.

And finally, B2B 3.0 Simplifies B2B for Suppliers and this enables buyers!

Simplifying B2B for Suppliers Enables Buyers

As an enterprise software user, you’re tired of hearing about “Web 2.0” because, despite all of the buzz it has generated for the last few years, and all of the “value” it has delivered to consumers through Amazon, Google Apps, and Facebook, it hasn’t done a single thing for you. And it’s good that you’re sick of “Web 2.0”. Software is supposed to serve you — you’re not supposed to serve it.

That’s why Sourcing Innovation is proud to announce the release of the second white-paper in its 5-part B2B 3.0 series. B2B 3.0 (Business-to-Business 3.0) is the next generation of technology for the enterprise that not only generates value for you as a buyer, but also generates value for your supplier as it helps you both save time and money — the way enterprise software should. Enterprise software should free you from the mundane and allow you to spend your time conducting commerce instead of fighting with primitive interfaces that force you to do everything but accomplish your goal.

B2B 3.0 is the first generation of enterprise software technology that puts business users on the same footing as consumers (who have had “3.0” technologies at their fingertips for years). It enables true commerce in the global marketplace. Returning to the fundamentals of e-Commerce, that have been lost for the last decade or so, B2B 3.0 gives us connectivity that is open and free to all, content that is managed once in a non-redundant fashion by the content owner, and an open community where buyers and sellers can come together for short periods of time through virtual networks that allow them to conduct the business they need to conduct — when, and how, they need to conduct it. No “technical” strings attached.

B2B 3.0 is also the first technology to level the playing field between buyers and suppliers and put them both on the same footing. Previous generations of B2B technology focused primarily on the buyer, the target customer, under the fallacy that ‘streamlining’ the process for the buyer would lead to the greatest cost savings. The reality is that this ‘streamlining’ resulted in increased work, and thus increased cost, for the supplier who had to ultimately increase their prices to cover their costs. The technology should have focused on ‘streamlining’ the process for the supplier, because this not only results in cost and process savings for the supplier, but it results in cost and process savings for the buyer as well. True commerce is simple for all.

In Simplifying B2B for Suppliers Enables Buyers, we walk through the B2B 1.0 to B2B 3.0 revolution and illustrate how B2B 3.0 actually saves both parties time and money, whereas suppliers, like buyers, were lucky to break even in B2B 2.0. and, like buyers, usually lost their shirts in B2B 1.0. We end with some examples of B2B 3.0 in action, giving you a glance into the B2B 3.0 future and some companies that might very well be the leaders of tomorrow.

Automation Does Solve the Supplier Enablement Problem …

… but it has to be done right! Regular readers of the Supply Chain Management Review will remember an article from about four months ago that attempted to address “How Automation Solves the Supplier Enablement Problem”. Noting a study from Aberdeen that found that enterprises with properly deployed supplier enablement strategies are able to drive down their costs by 71 percent, while also realizing an average cost more than 45 percent lower than their peers, the article noted that the utilization of automated processes instead of manual systems improves supplier enablement.

The article is right in that automation improves supplier enablement, right in that it is an ongoing effort that requires the utilization of software and the deployment of services, and right in that you have to engage the proper buyer-automation strategy. But it’s wrong when it states that only key and high-volume/high-dollar mid-tier suppliers should be integrated directly into the on-line marketplace. I understand why the recommendation is being made — it’s authored by an employee of a vendor of a marketplace solution that still uses punch-out and hosted catalogs — B2B 2.0 solutions.

(Simply put, the B2B 2.0 vendor logic is as follows:
(1) High dollar, high volume, low-maintenance members of the supplier community are usually already punch-out enabled, and, thus, easy to hook up directly,
(2) About half of the high dollar, high-volume, high-maintenance members of the supplier community will be punch-out enabled, and easy to hook up directly. The rest will likely have staff dedicated to maintaining catalogs in a common format, so it won’t be too much work to get these catalogs on a regular basis in a form that allows most of the products and services to be automatically imported into the vendor’s hosted catalog. Furthermore, the transaction revenues should come close to covering our hosting costs, but
(3) Low-dollar, low-volume members of the supplier community are not only not likely to be punch-out enabled, but also not likely to have an up-to-date catalog in a modern, standard, data-format. Hosting these catalogs will require a lot of work on our part at a cost much greater than the transaction revenues we are likely to see from them.
Thus, since
(1) a buyer’s key suppliers are high-dollar, high-volume, low-maintenance suppliers who are already punch-out enabled, and since
(2) a buyer’s mid-tier suppliers are high-dollar, high-volume, high-maintenance suppliers with good catalogs in a clean XML format,
we’re safe in recommending that the buyer integrate these suppliers directly into the on-line marketplace as it will be relatively easy and cost effective for us. But since low-dollar/low-volume suppliers who are not punch-out enabled and without good catalogs drive up our costs, drive down our margins, and risk pricing us out of the deal, we have to recommend that buyers deal with this group on a company-specific basis and host some of their enablement and offer encrypted email channels for other low-volume suppliers … because, not being B2B 3.0, we just can’t do it at an affordable price-point.)

If you are still using a vendor who is still on B2B 2.0, then the approach outlined in the article is the right one for you, since there is a cost associated with every supplier you integrate and you should only integrate suppliers where you’ll achieve an ROI. However, if you’ve progressed up the value-chain to B2B 3.0, then it doesn’t matter what format the supplier has their data in — punch out, hosted catalog, flat-file, on-line database, or proprietary XML. This is because a B2B 3.0 solution uses meta-search, web services, agents and mash-up technology that can automatically convert and search the suppliers’ catalogs, in any format it happens to be in, in real time, to the format used by your procurement or marketplace solution, and the cost for each supplier, once you’ve purchased and deployed the solution (which is usually implemented as a web-service) is minimal, and, more importantly, always fixed because it is SKU and format agnostic.

Furthermore, B2B 3.0 gives the supplier the choice on how he wants to be enabled … he can come direct from his existing XML punch-out, he can send you his catalog, he can send you his web-based database connection information, or he can just send you the URL of his web-site with on-line, real-time, pricing information. He can even direct you to a third-party marketplace that is already hosting his catalog if he wants to. And regardless of where your suppliers’ data comes from, the enabling technologies of B2B 3.0 will give you a single, simple, unified, and meta-search enabled view of your suppliers and their product and service offerings. This is because B2B 3.0 technologies aggregate the catalogs, punch-outs, and marketplace listings into a single, virtual marketplace customized for you.

That’s why B2B 3.0, a revolution that is about to take the enterprise software world by storm, is so critical to your future success. As the first generation of enterprise technology to enable true B2B e-Commerce that consists of simple, fast, low-cost transactions at true market prices, it’s also the first generation of technology with no limitations on content or community, as it’s able to take advantage of the full underlying connectivity offered by the Internet. For more information on B2B 3.0, check out the inaugural Sourcing Innovation Illumination Introducing B2B 3.0 and Simplicity for All, and for more information on how the right automation truly solves the supplier enablement problem, watch for the upcoming Sourcing Innovation Illuminations that will describe how Simplifying B2B for Suppliers Enables Buyers and how Content Enablement Technologies Enable e-Procurement 3.0.