B2B Exchanges: Future Hopes, Current Doubts

With these forces pushing and pulling on exchanges, the perspective of how businesses regard exchanges is confused. To clarify this picture, in the summer of 2001 Booz Allen Hamilton and Giga Information Group jointly conducted a survey of leading companies on their experiences with and expectations for exchanges.

The bottom line of these survey results is that most companies are still caught between hope of future benefits and disappointment with the performance to date. Indeed, an overwhelming majority of the respondents believe exchanges so far have not met or only partially met their needs. There was also a wide disconnect between the benefits companies expect from exchanges and the services currently offered. Still, companies acknowledged that not only will exchanges have to mature, but companies will also have to change their organizations and reevaluate current processes/behaviors to truly benefit from the services exchanges offer.

The Giga/Booz Allen Hamilton survey shows that, in spite of the challenges, companies expect to conduct the bulk of their direct materials and indirect materials spending through exchanges within three years. Private exchanges, consortia public exchanges and independent public exchanges largely will divide the transaction flow. The same companies also expect to use exchanges for collaborative supply chain management, for collaborative product development and for customer relationship management (CRMCRM). Alles zu CRM auf CIO.de

Creating a portfolio of exchanges - as opposed to finding or building one exchange that meets all needs - appears to be the best strategic choice to satisfy each particular business demand. The technology development that could most impact the use of exchanges is widespread adoption of new communications technologies, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML).