With the fear that e-marketplaces will increase competition and reduce margins, savvy companies are starting to use content as a strategic weapon to gain and defend market share.
Companies as divergent as systems integrator Arthur Andersen and content delivery provider Enigma will offer their services and technology to help companies offset the growing trend to commoditize even the most complex products.
In January, Arthur Andersen LLP will launch a multiyear program called Best Practices Capability, which company officials are calling a "subset" of knowledge management. The program will roll out in three phases and integrate the consulting firm's own best practices with the more industry-specific best practices of its clients.
Arthur Andersen will ultimately host and broker the combined best practices' content in an ASP (application service provider) model to its clients' customers.
Best practices to Arthur Andersen means that all companies at some level perform the same business processes, which can therefore be codified. But the definition of best practices varies by industry; to manufacturers, for instance, it can mean having an easy way to access technical specifications to select the right component for a job.
"Companies need to look at their assets differently. Charging a fee to gain access to information is a new way to enhance the intimacy of the customer relationship," said Susan Leandri, managing director for global best practices at Arthur Andersen, in Chicago.
These soft assets are what differentiate companies from their customers and their suppliers, with the added benefit of creating a new revenue channel, according to Leandri.
The emergence of e-marketplaces are changing the relationship between buyers and sellers, making content delivery of technical information a key component in maintaining a relationship, according to Randy Clark, a vice president at Burlington, Mass.-based Enigma Inc.
"Companies know content drives new business. GE puts its technical data behind Delta [Air Lines'] own firewall. They want to control their content, but at the same time they want their customers to use that content in a collaborative way," said Clark.
Enigma signed a deal last week with aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney to deploy all of Pratt & Whitney's technical documentation to the Web and to link it to their parts-ordering system using Enigma's CommerceSight XML-based technology.
"There were areas of our business that we could afford to ignore. We used to let somebody else do the service beyond any warranty work. But now third parties are allowed to design and build components for our engines and then offer the services, too. And they have less overhead," said David Brantner, director of e-business at Pratt & Whitney, in East Hartford, Conn.
The coming changes will be dramatic, according to Scott Crompton, vice president of global automotive practice at SeraNova Inc., an e-business consulting firm in Edison, N.J.
Crompton says that the manufacturing piece of a business is not generating as much to the bottom line as it used to. Instead, getting the product catalog published in as many places as possible, managing the supply chain, and fulfilling catalog orders will be how suppliers make their money.
"With this [online] exchange capability, suppliers have to think of themselves not as manufacturers but as content providers," Crompton said.
But fledgling exchanges still struggling to achieve liquidity may find it too expensive to maintain and host the kind of complex product information offered by the likes of GE and Pratt & Whitney.
The solution may be so-called manufacturer's aisles, in which companies such as GE and Pratt & Whitney can host their own content within an exchange, said Clark.
In this model, the exchange host gets the kind of anchor tenants it needs to attract customers; the manufacturer has its product catalogs more widely distributed; and content delivery companies, such as Enigma, supply the delivery technology to both the exchanges and the content owners, becoming a strategic partner to both.
