Business Value Innovation in B2B space - Part 3
In the last blog of this blog series, I introduced need of scaling up of the B2B operations. Part 3 will focus on the “Business Experience Quality of all the Stakeholders”, a very critical aspect of the doing business with global partner eco-system.
Conventional B2B (say up to early 2000) has been mostly about opening up a window from enterprise to partners in order to exchange business documents. Security was major concerns and more importantly the whole business model of exploiting the partner eco-system in inclusive manner was literally non-existent except for few B2B pioneers here and there. In integration world, how we refer to P2P, which is point to point connectivity and interaction model, similarly, I think the conventional model of B2B, is really a P2P form of the business exchange outside the enterprise.
In the more evolved state of business supply chain, B2B is more of a business collaboration hub and hence it necessitates the transformation in the way B2B has been looked at by all stakeholders. While in the conventional B2B model, it was a technical necessity, today it is way of doing business that identifies the brand, reputation and maturity of a business organization. Overall experience of doing business is an important aspect that business partners care for. Experience is a soft factor, however if I were to broadly dig into the DNA of this experience, it could be including the elements of:
- Partner friendliness of the B2B processes – this defines the business quality of the experience. Partners will value the B2B process maturity a lot where they don’t have to deal with process level redundancies, issue of data quality, painful / time consuming exception handling process, fragmented and disjointed processes or for that matter simple but important thing like visibility of important business information.
- Usability, adaptability, flexibility and reliability of the B2B platform shared with and integrated with the partner systems – B2B platform is the core around which B2B collaboration will revolve in today’s technologically advanced business landscapes. Hence it will be a matter of great interest for partners where B2B platform is highly usable (the user interaction side for facilities like partner self-service portal etc.), can adapt easily to technological maturity of the partners without much fuss, is highly reliable in terms of output and performance etc.
- Ease and speed with which partners can be on boarded – how quickly and how easily partners can be connected to enterprise partner network and how seamlessly business exchanges can begin is a great measure of enterprise’ B2B capability. A lengthy and complicated partner on boarding process/method not only discourages the partners to get into the network but also hinders the enterprise to quickly act on the new business partnership opportunities.
- Reduced complexity of rolling out enchancements /new functionality to partner network – further to on boarding, ongoing changes and maintenance activities are another set of complex and time consuming part of the B2B segment that partners are worried of. If B2B platform allows quick changes, without too much cycle-time of testing/deployment for every small change, it makes life easier and worry-free for partners. Partners should be able to deal with the B2B platform changes/enhancements without disrupting their business and without costing them heaven.
- Value enhancement to partners while doing business with the enterprise (through software services, infrastructure and knowledge sharing) – a rare consideration but increasingly becoming popular in which partners seek opportunity of their value enhancement while working with their partners. Such value enhancement could include software services/utilities/infrastructure extended to partners for free/low cost basis, business knowledge shared in terms of improvements, strategies and future opportunities etc. This take the relationship between partner from mere information/transaction data exchange to true business collaboration with long term relationship in mind.
- Opportunity to optimize and improve the B2B processes for mutual benefits (including reduction in cost per transaction) – very similar to previous one, partners look forward to have a say in on going fine tuning and optimization of the B2B process that brings value both to the enterprise as well to the partners. This sometime may mean the changes in the B2B platform, processes or methods for the enterprise but it goes long way in creating highly strategic and powerful partner network.
This, to me, does look like a different expectations from B2B than conventional B2B stuff in more than one ways. With business eco-systems getting more sophesticated, I personally believe that something of this sort is going to define the value system of B2B transformation and lot of that is already happening as we look around.
In the next blog, I will talk about the ‘Derisking of business continuity and growth’ which is becoming critical as supply chains are expanding across geographies across diverse set of partners.
