A Simple Plan

B2B implementation takes much more foresight and preparation than the B2C variety, so plan accordingly

By Dagmar Anne Bogan

Planning is the most important success factor in implementing business-to-business (B2B) applications such as e-catalog, e-procurement, or Web-enabled ERP packages. It is also the most overlooked factor, even by many professional B2B service companies.

I recently met a manager for a new B2B services company who has extensive B2C experience. When I asked him what services his firm provides to clients, he replied: "Product selection and implementation." When I asked about planning, he responded that his company would provide "project" planning; he saw no need to have strategic or IT plans in place prior to e-business development.

Unfortunately, this attitude is common among folks without much B2B experience. For many companies, the B2B plan is simply, "Let's build a Web site."

This attitude is beginning to change, at least at the executive level. According to a recent survey of global CEOs by management consultant firm A. T. Kearney, although only 41 percent of CEOs believe that e-business will have an impact on their organization, more than 70 percent have decided to implement an e-business strategy. Those who have been down this path before realize that having an e-business strategy in place first is the critical success factor in B2B implementation.

Unfortunately, even when such planning occurs, B2B strategists often do so in an incorrect manner by focusing solely on either the business side or the IT side of the organization.

Consider this example: I know of one company implementing a B2B e-catalog site that developed an IT project plan but never shared it with its business managers. However, sales personnel who had heard rumors about it soon told their customers that the application would be available by a specific date - but not the production one estimated by IT. Consequently, customers began requesting the service far in advance of its availability, resulting in an increased number of customer complaints as well as customer loss of faith.

It's easy to implement B2C applications, which usually are some type of e-catalog or e-brochure. In these applications, most customer transactions occur completely inside the Web front end and then stream into the existing production system; the Web site and the legacy systems and other company systems are very loosely coupled. Consequently, with such a low impact on the production systems, planning is not as great a need in B2C implementations.

In contrast, B2B solutions require tight coupling within the organization as well as outside it. B2B processes such as ordering, purchasing, and shipping are highly dependent on existing production systems, so more planning in required. For example, your company cannot streamline its supply chain to connect the customer and supplier if your internal ordering system can't communicate with the warehouse system. Unfortunately, the greater the opportunity for ROI, the more difficult the task will be. (See Figure 1)

The High Cost of B2B

Many companies have been only slowly undergoing e-business transformation partially because of the costs involved. ROI is a significant issue, but ensuring ROI from a B2B project requires fixing existing production system problems that no one wants to tackle. Usually those legacy fixes are time consuming and have little or no payback until they become impediments to the B2B project.

Dirty data is one common example of such a fix. In this era of "business cases," it is nearly impossible to justify the cost of cleaning data. However, if this data is going to be visible to either your customer or supplier, the data needs to be "clean," with a very high level of data quality.