One in two companies complain that business-to-business (B2B)
trading exchanges have not met their expectations, according to a
joint survey by research firm Giga Information Group and US
management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton.
The study shows that 51% of the companies surveyed said B2B
exchanges, whether private, public or consortia, had either
"mostly" or "absolutely" failed to meet their expectations. A mere
9% said their experience had "mostly" met expectations, and only 2%
said it had "absolutely" done so.
The report, B2B Exchanges: future hopes, current doubts, surveyed
57 US firms across a range of industries, a third of which were in
the financial services sector.
Andrew Bartels, vice-president for e-business applications and
strategy at Giga Group, said many had expected that the technology
would be mature from the start and easier to use than it actually
was.
"There was the expectation that the technology would be more
available and would allow people to get online and be operational
fairly quickly, that you could connect to one point and from there
you could link to all of your partners and suppliers rather than
having to connect one by one," he said.
These beliefs had not been met because linking to an exchange was
not about "plug-and-play", he said. More importantly, unless a
company's partners and suppliers were hooked up to these exchanges,
it was unlikely that they had reaped the expected benefits.
"This statistics point to an increasing realisation that is not
just a question of hooking up to an exchange. Unless a significant
percentage of your partners participate, it isn't going to help
much."
Firms also needed to have a better understanding of what benefits
could be reaped from the different types of exchanges: public,
private and consortia. "Companies need a way of assessing which
channel is the right one to use - with some, you will link through
either a public exchange, a private exchange, or others might want
to continue working through existing electronic channels, such as
EDI," Bartels said.
Further Information:
www.gigaweb.com/browsemktg/