Power of SaaS Communities in e-Procurement
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By now, everyone has heard of social networking and Web communities.
Many of us use Facebook and LinkedIn and MySpace to build personal and
professional connections. We rely on Wikipedia and other wikis for
information, and make our own contributions. We share photos on Flickr,
post videos to YouTube, read and write blogs, use bookmarking tools
like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, and subscribe to RSS feeds.
We participate in community Web sites and message forums to learn
and share information on just about every topic under the sun —
pet care, bobblehead dolls, classical music, Harley Davidson
motorcycles, you name it. And many of us buy in a community model.
Amazon, for instance, is in effect a buy/sell community that
leverages aggregated data to inform prospective purchasers what other
like-minded individuals have bought. If you buy on Amazon, or research
electronic products at Cnet.com, chances are you read reviews from
other buyers. On eBay you check seller ratings.
Those reviews are critical to buyer satisfaction and the market
success of sellers and their merchandise. That’s the power of
community. It swaps out “me” for “we.” It puts
a premium on collective intelligence in a participatory and distributed
model available to anyone with an Internet connection, anywhere in the
world, to the benefit of all.
While communities and social networking flourish, many enterprises
continue to languish with basic business functions. Many small and
medium enterprises (SMEs), for instance, rely on paper-based processes
and costly, complex on-premise applications to run procurement. The
problem isn’t just that conventional procurement results in high
costs, inefficiency and wasted resources. Those are only the symptoms.
The core problem in SME procurement boils down to sub-par
communication, information access and knowledge sharing — pretty
much the polar opposite of consumer-oriented Web 2.0 communities, when
you think about it. These issues afflict all parties in a procurement
network — buyers, accounts payable managers, end-user employees,
inventory personnel and suppliers. And they extend across each step in
the procurement cycle, from requisitioning to purchase order management
to receiving, inventory management and invoicing.
Thinking Outside the Procurement Box
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