Maybe you’ve seen the numbers. If not, you should.

Consider this: Business-to-business e-commerce generates five times more money than consumer Web purchases. Impressive? Sure, but that’s only the beginning. According to Gartner Group Inc., Stamford, Conn., a leading research and advisory firm, the forecasts for B2B activity are as high as $7 trillion by 2004.

Some might say it’s about time. If you did you’d be absolutely right. Time, in fact, is the biggest obstacle to reaching an efficient and effective move into e-business, and ultimately your share of the predicted trillions.

A national study by a provider of B2B technology solutions shows that the biggest bottleneck to widespread adoption and the ultimate success of B2B e-commerce, is something called manual “enablement.” That is, the labor-intensive process of preparing a company, its internal systems and its trading partners to begin conducting transactions over all of its trading networks.

“The problem is that trading communities on the Internet, whether they’re part of an exchange or a private network, are taking far too long to get off the ground,” says Sunny Singh, CEO of Edifecs in Bellevue, Wash., which conducted the study, “Solving the B2B Ramp-up Challenge: Key to Realizing Widespread B2B Adoption.”

“B2B, by definition, is all about communities. For B2B communities to prosper — to really attain the kinds of benefits everyone is talking about — they must comprise hundreds or thousands of participants actively collaborating with each other.”

But that kind of electronic synergy could take forever at the current pace, according to the survey.

Based on data from nearly 400 e-commerce managers from a cross-section of companies, it takes an average of three months to ramp up just one electronic process with a single partner.

Still, the potential for e-business is so potentially rewarding that companies queried have plans to greatly expand B2B initiatives, even though they’re only able to transact a tiny percentage of their business online.

“This is the scenario that research firms and analysts have in mind when they come up with their B2B growth estimates,” Singh says of the multi-level e-business collaboration on the Web. “Unfortunately, because the enablement challenge is so stiff, there’s a considerable hill to climb before reality catches up with projections.”

It’s clear there are enormous advantages in using the Internet to deepen and secure relationships with any and all of your end users and suppliers — advantages like being accessibility, better service and the ability to lock in key relationships.

Oh, and there’s that $7 trillion carrot researchers and analysts like to dangle in front of us.

The thing is, B2B e-commerce isn’t simply about putting your catalog and prices online. It’s more complicated and, seemingly, more time-consuming.

According to the Edifecs’ survey, there are several major steps that must be completed more quickly before a company can begin getting serious about its Internet presence. Among them are:

  • B2B preparation. Call it groundwork. Right now, the survey claims, it takes an average of 188 person-days to complete.
  • B2B Ramp-up: This involves everything from establishing an electronic-trading arrangement for a single process with one trading partner; setting up internal systems for electronic trading; developing specifications that guide the electronic communications between the companies’ systems; testing the systems; and “going live.” This phase takes an average of 95 person-days to complete.

The faster we move to automate some of these steps, the survey insinuates, the more quickly we will see positive results.

Oh, and one more thing to consider: 18 months from now, there are expected to be 2 billion wireless devices connected to the Internet. That means that both your end users and employees will want access to the information they need, anytime, anyplace.

There’s more, much more, but we’ve all got work to do. After all, there’s no time to waste.




POSTED ON: 3/1/2001