Banking & Finance
A team effort
Is collaborative commerce the future of business?
By Todd Shryock
Smart Business Cleveland | October 2000
What if you could be part of major contracts for Fortune 500 companies on a regular basis? And, what if you didn't need to do much to get these jobs?
Sound too good to be true? Well, with collaborative commerce, this is already a reality for many small electronics manufacturers.
Using collaborative commerce, a company essentially acts as a general contractor on behalf of the Fortune 500 firm. This contractor has a stable of companies which handle a variety of tasks during the production process, but any one on its own could never handle the contract.
For example, a Fortune 500 company might decide it needs a particular electronic product. Rather than doing the work in house or even handling all the outsourcing itself, the company hires the "contractor" company to do the project. This contractor then assigns the tasks to various companies to get different aspects of the project completed.
"We choose the best partner for each part of the life cycle," says Steve Mason, vice president of marketing for Tonbu, a collaborative commerce general contractor for the electronics industry. "We then get them together on a collaborative platform in a secure environment that is accessible through a standard Internet browser. The customers, suppliers or manufacturers can all work on the project from wherever they may be in real time and can exchange documents."
Tonbu gathers potential partners in advance, looking at what skills or expertise each company could bring to a project. When a project arises, the team is assembled from the existing stable of companies.
"This can include a single consultant or a small business," says Mason. "C-commerce enables companies with core competencies to participate in large projects that they wouldn't have had access to before."
In a sense, a virtual company is formed. Once the project is complete, it is dissolved.
Mason says there are three key factors driving this concept:
- Improved time to market. Much of the groundwork is already done when a project starts.
- Improved quality. The companies used in a project are proven winners in their areas of expertise. Good companies produce good products.
- Cost reductions.
With all the contributors working from the same Web base, everyone is seeing the same information at the same time and there is less muddled communication. Businesses can also use C-commerce to scale up production for a project without hiring additional staff or adding to manufacturing facilities to complete it.
"This is really the cusp of the new industrial revolution," says Mason. "It's a new way of doing business. It cuts out a lot of the difficulties. This is opening up the business world to opportunities to individuals and companies with talent that didn't have the opportunity in the past." How to reach: www.tonbu.com
Todd Shryock (tshryock@sbnnet.com) is SBN's special reports editor.
