Business processes are
building blocks of an enterprise. If one of these processes fails to live up to its expectation, business starts to flounder. How to minimize risks, get a better monitoring of processes and, at same time, reduce costs involved? The answer is – business process automation. Although, automated business processes based on online technologies can create incredible value to existing business, many companies are slow to adopt technological innovations and reap benefits from them. However, lately, things have started to change! According to a recent poll conducted among mid size companies shows 52 percent of respondents plan to spend over a million dollar on business process automation. Large companies – early adopters of online business processes – have been immensely profiting from value created by process automation. Intel recently announced that it saved one billion dollar last year alone thanks to online business process management.
In broader sense, business process management technology delivers solutions to understand, analyze and simulate business process models. Companies adopt this technology to streamline their business operations, lower overhead expenses, reduce maverick buying, reduce paper-based – mistake prone – transactions and get better control. The ultimate goal is to make corporation a fully process-managed enterprise, transformed through strategy, design, realization and actual operations.
Companies require streamlining their business processes to help solve various crucial but specific problems, such as:
- An electronic supplier, in order to stay competitive, requires reducing order fulfillment cost aggressively.
- A merchant needs to reduce shipping time by better monitoring his inbound shipping.
- A manufacturer needs to cut production cost by reducing manufacturing time of a key product.
- A bank needs to develop and market a financial product faster than its competitors.
- A large distributor needs to consolidate buyers and suppliers to bring efficiency to its business.
Although, business processes are wide in range; and there are many complex issues that require meticulous work, automation of some basic processes may bring notable result for virtually any company. These processes include supply chain, procurement, logistics, inventory control, etc. By adopting an online business to business exchange companies can streamline most of these business processes bringing added value to their operations.
A B2B exchange is a unified online platform, where buyers and sellers login to communicate, collaborate and make business transactions. A private B2B exchange, mostly, consolidates suppliers and buyers of a specific company, which owns and operates exchange.
There are two ways of integrating B2B exchange to automate business processes. A company can participate in existing B2B exchange or create its own private exchange.
While for small companies, it is more viable to participate in a major B2B exchange that has required components, larger companies should consider creating their own B2B exchange.
The profits companies can reap from joining an existing B2B exchange or creating their own private one could be enormous.
Customer Base Development
A supplier, once registers with a B2B exchange, gets immediate access to a large community of prospective buyers of his products or services.
Increase Revenue from Existing Customers
Business process automation allows companies develop products faster, buyers get faster and easier access to product information, receive quicker response to their requests, get better customer support and may buy products online. These turn into more sales.
