Collaboration

Working Together With A Common Goal

Collaborative commerce is generally known as "c-commerce". Some of the first examples of c-commerce, were customers and suppliers sharing forecasting and sales information electronically to facilitate just-in-time (JIT) deliveries and inventory management across the supply chain. But the scope of today's collaboration is much wider, encompassing procurement, development from design to manufacture, strategic planning and fulfillment. In a nutshell, c-commerce is about making intelligent business decisions via the Internet with your collaborative partners.

To enable effective c-commerce, the collaborative partnerships must share much more information than they imagine. Not only inventory and logistics information, but also sales and procurement information. This opens up a completely different ball game. These business relationships that are likely to fit are existing ones, where such levels of trust are already in existence. An example of this level of partnership would be in the automotive industry where opposing dealers exchange sales and stock information with manufacturers for everyone's benefit including the customer.

C-commerce solutions will be developed initially through existing business partnerships, but then through companies that are enabled to dynamically exchange data via the Internet. Many consultants are already talking about automated "reverse auction site" capability, where a customer could make an offer to buy a product and the collaboration system locates the supplier, confirms a selling price and delivery dates. These wider reaching supply chain issues will effect our supply chains as more integration of systems and data exchanges are required.