Have you heard the huge buzz surrounding the brave new world of c-commerce? This unwelcome neologism stands for the welcome notion of collaborative commerce.

In the face of stumbling public e-marketplace viability, hypists are extolling the virtues of collaborative commerce frameworks as the latest and greatest means for trading partners to enhance their SCM (supply-chain management) prospects.

Vendors, too, have begun touting their collaborative commerce worth in a product category that, quite frankly, is more of an idea than a category with any agreed-on particulars.

The concept behind collaborative commerce is to break the rigidity of supply-chain model constraints and dynamically enhance information sharing through integration technologies and the Internet. The concept is to bridge employees, customers, and partners in such a way as to improve trust, share information, and ensure mutual agility and resourcefulness across transactions.

Am I missing something, or is the concept nothing more than a new moniker for a well-integrated, perhaps slightly communication-enhanced, commerce initiative participating in a private trading exchange?

Private trading exchanges provide the technology platform that enables collaborative interactions with trading partners and customers. The exchanges combine integration and process management, Web service connectivity, and collaboration and document standardization into a single trading interface.

Even if your business is already participating in public exchanges, the centralized command-center approach of a private trading exchange can help bolster integration and management of the hand-picked buyers and suppliers with whom you choose to trade.

Private trading exchanges are not cheap. The additional requirements you'll face to satisfy partner buy-in, both in the immediate sense and in assuring future partner-integration ease, can be steep and time-consuming.

The advantage of a smaller private exchange between trading partners is that it can be established quickly -- without having to first agree on technologies and features. Companies can get to market faster, often in months.

Furthermore, private exchanges can enrich your limited-community partnerships with all of the benefits extolled by public exchanges: SCM efficiency, auctions, catalog-based purchasing capabilities, and collaborative planning and predictive supply forecasting.

Besides cost concerns, other reasons for choosing to go private include issues such as security. By transacting business in a public forum, companies run the risk of exposing proprietary data.

Another factor is the sheer, inbred competitiveness of business. Many companies aren't attuned to sharing the benefits of bulk purchasing. Most prefer to remain selective when inviting partners to engage in business.

Public marketplaces may seem to provide your company with the greatest ROI for competitive cost cutting. So you might appear to run the risk of cutting your company off from large-scale supply-and-demand benefits by avoiding public exchanges. But the dust hasn't settled on the future of their SCM efficiency, and the course of the next year isn't likely to instill many CTOs with a sense of confidence.

Private trading exchangers don't need to spend time warming the bench. Rather, they can begin right away building efficient collaboration among buyers and suppliers.

Eventually, as smaller private exchange vendors mature and gain in popularity, the standards for interoperability will find a common middle ground.

The market will likely develop a global, XML-based interconnectivity among multiple private exchanges, bridging interexchange communications. For example, when a business cannot locate a suitable vendor within its own private exchange, anonymous calls to other private or public exchanges will help fill the order, essentially delivering the very benefits of today's costly public marketplaces.

Successful execution will enable the linking of multiple b-to-b services, public marketplaces, and private consortiums, while maintaining closer scrutiny over infrastructure and smaller trading partners.

Collaborative commerce doesn't represent anything terribly new. Good communication in commerce has always demanded a solid understanding of the relationships among trading partners.

In the coming year, private trading exchanges will dominate the SCM frontier. And this is one bandwagon I suggest you consider jumping on.

Get Enterprise Strategies via e-mail

Get my column free via e-mail. Sign up at www.iwsubscribe.com/newsletters.

» posted by ITworld staff

InfoWorld

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine