The Inovis Blog

I’ve had a great deal of time on the road the last 60 days and I’ve come to appreciate the complexity of B2B just a little bit more. There were several very interesting questions that came up during a couple of my presentations. The first one was around a presentation I did on supply chain execution at the Pervasive iNext conference, not sure the exact question so here is a paraphrase: – “How can I leverage visibility to improve and engage members of my business to understand the level of effort required to managed a B2B program?” Needless to say it was a very BIG question, but after asking a follow up question I was able to discern that the question was more about managing demand in the business than the ultimate “run-time” activities.

Demanding Enablement and IT Effort

The situation for the person who asked the question was that he had more work than he could accomplish in a single year, but less than a year to get things done, so he had to engage external resources to do additional mapping which came at a cost. A cost that wasn’t budgeted and required additional approvals to get done. The company he worked for used an email based scoping process, approval process and requirements management – not very transparent or effective when trying to better manage demand for the business and costs. B2B enablement and on-boarding is a complex set of activities and is leveraging a way to capture requirements, manage approval work flows and ultimately move partners in production. This is a life cycle and requires process and visibility to the development process that will allow for more optimal prioritization and analysis. It is definitely an interesting challenge to aid in driving process improvements via a holistic approach to managing the demand inside the IT organization from concept to production. This approach is often only leveraged for large activities in a business and very often B2B organization is managing demand via email, spreadsheets and faxes.

Partner Management?

The other question that centered on the IT processes and controls came up after a presentation at Infor’s Inforum user conference a couple of weeks ago. The presentation was a focus on community management and rolling out capabilities to suppliers and customers. The question was not unlike the first question from the supply chain execution presentation: “The biggest challenge we have is making sure we have all the requirements and agreement signed by our suppliers to start the process, we have a good deal paper which shuffles from desk to desk, which needs to be done prior to any work in the B2B group.”

Process visibility and governance is important to ensure all the right tasks are completed in a timely fashion and that an audit trail exists for who authorizes what and for making sure all the tollgates are met. After these questions and a review of how customers and organization manage demand for B2B, it became evident that Business Community Management is as much about the process and interaction as it is about moving transactions and being compliant to customer/business requirements.