Another Net portal promises e-commerce for all
By Mark Vigoroso -- Purchasing, 5/20/1999
Keeping track of the business-to-business e-commerce market can be an exercise in over-stimulation, with each passing month bringing new vendors, new technologies, and new projections about THE solution. Forming at the center of the whirlwind is an increasing trend toward open trading communities, or e-commerce portals, where multiple buyers and multiple sellers can conduct business online with little more than a Web browser. With little risk involved, commerce portals are worth investigating as viable e-commerce solutions for many buying organizations.A pioneer of open standards in e-commerce, Intelisys Electronic Commerce recently introduced their portal offering at www.intelisys.com. With this site, Intelisys aids buyers in building their own business-to-business portal communities, primarily in the area of indirect production materials. Communities can be opened to multiple buyers and suppliers, allowing smaller buyers to take advantage of the breadth and depth of a much larger buyer's supply base. By shouldering the costly burdens of catalog content generation, transaction services, order tracking, and infrastructure maintenance, Intelisys can support business relationships online without respect to a company's size or cash flow. Participation in a community can cost as little as $25 per month.
As is typical with this model, larger buyers provide the impetus for creating a community. They define who their strategic suppliers are; if these suppliers do not have a Web presence, the buyer directs them to Intelisys' catalog Web service to deploy an electronic catalog. If a supplier already has its own Web catalog, they can still interface with the community through open buying on the Internet (OBI) compliant communications. In either case, buyers set business rules for their own requisitioners to follow when placing orders online.
"The large buyers provide the gravitational force and the momentum for the development of a community," says Lloyd O'Connor, CEO at Intelisys.
Intelisys functions as an intermediary for the buyer. Using a hosted purchasing management tool, buying organizations can check order status, receive invoices and acknowledgements, and generate purchasing process reports. This is especially valuable to small to mid-market players without the money or vast supply base to justify an investment in an enterprise procurement application.
"We've taken our experience with large buyers' enterprise applications and translated it into a hosted Web service," says O'Connor.
Using a business-to-business "on ramp," suppliers can build and launch their own online catalog and make ongoing updates as needed. They publish their content once and can create different price profiles, depending on whether or not a prospective buyer is on contract. To differentiate themselves from their competitors, suppliers can customize the advertising that runs within the community.
As an additional service, suppliers can register their products and services in a directory of United Nations Standard Product and Service Classifications, making it easier for buyers to search across all available goods in their community.
Suppliers also can take advantage of a transaction processing service hosted by Intelisys, that enables them to receive and respond to OBI-compliant purchase orders through a Web browser interface. And this order information can be integrated into their existing back-end order processing systems.
"At the very least, the portal provides smaller suppliers with a viable intermediary step toward broader strategic e-commerce initiatives," says O'Connor.
As with most portal models, buyers who join Intelisys' B2B Portals may see lower operational and transaction costs, and shortened cycle times. Of course, like in all open trading communities, the supply base is limited to only suppliers that have signed on. Further, Intelisys does not offer buyers the same level of back-office integration that some of its competitors do. Integration with ERP systems is what enables buyers to exercise pinpoint control over their spending behavior and inventory, and to implement process improvements.
The extent of back-office integration is a variable in the commerce portal space. Intelisys allows for some integration with back-office accounting systems, but not with inventory management or MRP systems. On this point, Intelisys' communities fall somewhere in the middle of the portal spectrum, offering more integration than WIZnet's eCommerce Portal (www.ec-portal.com) but not nearly as much as Commerce One's MarketSite.net (www.marketsite.net) (PUR: Apr. 22, '99).
"Our portals offer buyers limited workflow management on the back-end," says David Strauss, vice president of marketing at Intelisys. "But integration is not nearly as seamless as it is with our buy-side enterprise application, IEC-Enterprise."
As an intermediary, Intelisys adds value to the buying-selling relationship through site hosting and support, customer service, transaction and catalog services, and advertising.
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