Another article by yours truly.  This time in Supply & Demand Chain Executive and in the same issue where Hubspan was named one of the “2008 Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100” as one of “100 ways to innovate your supply chain with the providers of next-wave supply chain services and solutions.”

Unlocking B2B’s True Potential

Yours truly with a contributed article in the most recent Supply Chain Management Review.  Sort of a top ten approach to building deeper electronic relationships with customers and suppliers.

Ten Steps to Deeper Connections

According to our recently released survey, that’s where roughly 90% of companies place it.  I think this sets up a bit of a misalignment of priorities.  eBusiness is about company to company communication and about orders and revenue.  These are generally not at the top of the IT goals list and adding another company’s system to the mix seriously challenges the goal of keeping control over the IT environment.

Many of our customers align ebusiness with sales or marketing and these organizations not only benefit from a longer and wider view of the function but also are keenly aware of the benefits that come from deep integration with customer ordering systems and accelerated invoicing processes.

Dashboards, business intelligence, and KPIs are some of the ways that companies achieve the goal of process visibility…or at least that is the way it is suppose to be. 

There is no shortage of tools that allow you to see what happened historically from built in reports to custom business intelligence applications.  The fundamental problem is this:  just knowing how many purchase orders, invoices, or order inquiries you sent does not mean you have visibility to the whole business process. 

The real questions are – Did they get there?  Are they being processed?  Are they in the right format?  Did I get back what I was suppose to? and many, many more.

At Hubspan our business is not business intelligence but we are in a unique position to show companies what didn’t happen.  We can do this because we can see both sides of the transaction – both sender and receiver.  We can not only see both sides but can make sure that what is sent is also received the way both sides want it to be. 

If you don’t have this view to both ends of a message then you don’t have true process visibility. 

How’s that for acronym soup?  Software as a service (SaaS) is all about providing value on-demand without the need to deploy software on premise.  Fundamental to this a multi-tenant architecture meaning you don’t have to have an instance of a software product for every customer you serve on-demand.  That’s one of the things that makes Hubspan unique (yes, that is a plug) and sets us apart.

This is a good post from Mark Morley over at GXS on this topic as it relates to the automotive industry (his focus) but these data points can be applied across verticals.

Had the opportunity to attend a great couple of presentations the other day thanks to an invite from Tom Westbrook and the Open Network for Commerce Exchange (ONCE) at the Fairmont Hotel here in Seattle.  Great presentations by Clay Siemson, Director of E-business from OfficeMax, and Chris Vike, Director of Information Management from Weyerhauser, on the topics of B2B traction and 3rd party B2B services, respectively.  The conversation was more about industry trends and best practices than anything else.  Here’s a couple of points I took away from the gathering:

1. 100% trading partner enablement remains elusive especially for those with non-standard connection requirements or that don’t transact significant volumes.
2. eBusiness is a corporate priority that includes both the business and IT sides of the house.
3. There are significant opportunities for process improvement related to what happens when an order fails or when an invoice does not get delivered as intended.
4. Improvements in these processes have significant cash flow impact as it relates to reducing days sales outstanding (DS0) via invoice acceleration or time to cash with order validation among other opportunities.

All in all a great gathering and I appreciate Tom inviting us to attend.