Efficient Business-to-Business Relationships
How Analytics and XML Can Help
By Tim Sloane, Seema Phull, and Ketan Patel
When the business community adopted the Internet en masse, many believed that there would soon be an infrastructure in place to help facilitate the timely communication of critical information among trading partners. Although it has taken time, we are now beginning to see the initial rollout of that infrastructure in the form of new business-to-business (B2B) commerce chains. This is due in large part to the widespread availability of new XML-based B2B systems.
With many of these initial deployments, however, companies are simply "getting into the game." They're implementing the basic functions required to share transaction information among their disparate systems. While minimal capability is important for improving efficiency and broadening the field of potential trading partners, it doesn't provide companies with the ability to analyze the effectiveness of their commerce chains. Therefore, they don't have access to the information required to optimize those chains.
To make up for lack of access, a new kind of XML analytic capability actually sits in the network, providing trading partners with on-demand visibility into commerce chains. This new type of In-the-Net analytics provides companies with the price, availability, supplier, and product transparency that businesses dreamed would arrive with B2B commerce.
From Exclusive Club to Complex Web
In the past, trading networks were exclusive clubs in which the largest member would dictate technology infrastructure and business terms to the smaller companies.
