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Many businesses do not use B2B eCommerce interfaces such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or other methods to exchange electronic documents with suppliers and customers. There are many reasons for this. The primary reasons are inertia, resistance to change, inhibited by the technology, and not realizing the B2B eCommerce opportunity.

B2B eCommerce Definition. B2B eCommerce in its essence is an interface, an electronic interface between two or more businesses to exchange business documents. Common electronic business documents include purchase orders, shipment status, and invoices.

The Missed Opportunity Costs of Not Doing B2B eCommerce. Many businesses do not use B2B eCommerce interfaces such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or other methods to exchange electronic documents with suppliers and customers. If you are a small business, this may be fine, but if you are a medium or large business this is costly. Not using B2B eCommerce costs businesses in a lot of ways. The three largest missed opportunity costs include increased labor to process business documents, increased time-to-market cycle, and increased payment cycle. These costs are not missed revenue opportunities, but are costs that go directly against the bottom line.

The B2B eCommerce Opportunity Questions. If you are not using B2B eCommerce, ask yourself the following questions.

• Could you decrease your administrative costs if you did not have to manually process purchase orders?
• Could you reduce your inventory and increase your order fulfillment rate, if you automatically exchanged electronic business documents with your suppliers and customers?
• Could you decrease the average time it takes to fulfill a customer order if you did not have to wait and process paper documents?
• Could you ship and receive products and orders faster, if you had electronic document interfaces with your transportation carriers?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, it is time for you to implement one or multiple B2B eCommerce interfaces with your suppliers or customers. Sometimes all you need to do is ask your suppliers or customers if they already do B2B eCommerce interfaces with other trading partners.

Take the Initiative to Identify B2B eCommerce Opportunities. With a little analysis and with a little help you should be able to identify specific B2B eCommerce interface opportunities that benefit your business. These are opportunities that will go right to your bottom line by reducing labor to process business documents, reducing time-to-market cycles, and reducing payment cycles. Read more about the benefits of B2B eCommerce.

This is an exciting time for anyone that follows information technology trends. There is not so much as a bunch of new technologies emerging, but there is a convergence of web-based technologies and real-world sensor technologies. Web converges with the real-world:

• Web is Becoming Real-Time. The web is turning into a real-time, information-rich, interactive conversation between applications and people. This is because of technology phenomenons such as social media, search engines, cloud computing, and broadband.

• Omnipresent Sensors in Real-World. The real-world is getting embedded with cheap, omnipresent sensor technology such as RFID, GPS, biometrics, cameras, and instrumental sensors.

Now people and software applications are interacting with web and sensor technologies in real-time. Tim O’Reilly calls this phenomenon “Web Squared”.

B2B Web-Squared Trends. Many large businesses and Government agencies already have “Web-Squared” initiatives in place. The most notable examples are in the areas of supply chain and Business-to-Business (B2B) eCommerce. B2B Web-Squared Examples:

• Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a pioneer in using bar codes and RFID technologies to keep near and real-time visibility of products and shipments. Many large businesses also use the web to exchange electronic documents with their suppliers.

• U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The U.S. DoD has used active RFID tags as well as web technologies to track and trace shipping containers globally for years.

Both Government and large businesses are continuing to leverage both web technologies and sensor technologies to start to tag and track items down to the package and product level.

Opportunity to Expand B2B Web-Squared Technology to Small Businesses. With the costs of “Web-Squared” technologies going down and everyone becoming familiar with the technologies, there is a real opportunity for medium and small businesses to start using Web-Squared technologies. Passive RFID tags are now under ten cents, and cell phone GPS chips are getting down to five dollars a piece. We should start seeing a lot more initiatives and business services opening up for small businesses to exchange electronic business documents and information in real-time.

Sometimes it amazes me how little has happened in the last 10 years in regard to B2B eCommerce. One of the biggest challenges is with large businesses exchanging electronic business documents with “mom and pop manufacturers worldwide”. Many large retailers, manufacturers, and service providers have deployed extensive B2B eCommerce networks, but has it really helped small and medium businesses join the “B2B revolution”?

The B2B eCommerce Supplier Challenge. It almost makes me cry when I come across a small supplier that is trying to be EDI compliant with a Big Box retailer. These suppliers have to incur all types of expense and grief to meet the EDI requirements of a Big Box retailer.

Sometimes the suppliers get help from a compassionate Big Box retailer that provides a free EDI client communications application. The challenge with this is that many suppliers have to hook up with three or more Big Box retailers. Now, the supplier, big or small, has to wrestle with different B2B eCommerce technologies like XML, EDI, Secure FTP, AS2, and so on. Besides this they have to make sure the electronic documents and their business processes are compliant with their various business customers. Most of these suppliers do not have an IT staff, so they end up outsourcing the EDI work at great expense, muddle through it, or just give up.

Most of these suppliers just want to receive an electronic purchase order, and then send an electronic advance shipment notice, and then provide an electronic invoice to their business customer. Does B2B eCommerce have to be this hard?

A B2B eCommerce Solution for Suppliers. In a perfect world, it would be great if all “mom and pop” suppliers had free EDI communications client software that could hook up with any large business trading partner. This way a supplier could use the same software to exchange electronic documents. Today suppliers must use multiple B2B eCommerce solutions to hook into multiple, proprietary B2B eCommerce networks.

Is a Standard B2B Client Software Too Simple? The basic B2B processes between all suppliers and retailers are fairly simple - 850 < -> 856 < -> 810 (purchase order, advance shipment notice, invoice). A free EDI communications client software program could have one standard data format for all suppliers. Large businesses could then map to the standard format or provide the client software a map to create an EDI document to their specifications. The supplier could then just use the B2B client software, select “Big Box 1 850 Purchase Order”, and start generating EDI documents compliant with their business customer.

If I was Bill Gates, I would just give away free client EDI communications software to all suppliers, and then let all the big manufacturers, retailers, and service providers integrate with it for free. Am I dreaming …