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Grow_your_Business_with_Emarketplace_Part_III
| Grow your Business with Emarketplace Part III
Increase Company Productivity
After years of hard work, finally your business started to pick
up. You are selling more products then ever! You have lined up a
good number of suppliers and buyers. Things have never been
better than now. Except one thing! With rising sales your
overhead and supply chain expenses are also sky-rocketing. Your
profit margin is no longer the same as it used to be! You feel
that you are in a limbo! How to increase productivity? How to
cut costs without giving up sales?
Sounds familiar to you? Well, your company is not alone!
According to IDC, a research firm, while interviewed,
overwhelming majority of the company executives claimed that
their biggest concern is declining profit margins.
Companies, in order to stay competitive, must find solutions to
increase efficiency in business operations and control costs. Is
there a solution to this ubiquitous problem?
Remember Dorothy from the children classic “Wizard of the Oz”?
She had to go through numerous obstacles in her quest to find a
way to get back to Kansas, her home. Only to find out that the
silver shoes that she was wearing from the very first day since
the cyclone brought her to the Land of Oz could have taken her
back home, all she had to do was to knock the heels together
three times and command the shoes to carry her wherever she
wished to go.
Similar to this story, solutions to these corporate problems are
widely available right under your nose, only you as a company
executive have to overcome the fear of new technologies and
adopt them to your own good.
B2B exchanges or emarketplaces are capable of solving many key
problems that corporations are facing today. Emarketplaces can
provide immense opportunities to automate supply chain process,
increase operational efficiency, reduce overhead costs and
expand market at a minimal cost.
Using emarketplace effectively Two primary factors of company
productivity are Revenue Increase and Cost Cutting. Both are
achievable if a company seriously decides to incorporate
emarketplace features in all aspects of business operations.
That means if as a company you want to reap all the benefits of
emarketplaces, you have to commit yourself seriously.
Become a member Once you find an emarketplace that suits your
requirement, the first thing what you have to do is to register
and become a member. Most emarketplaces have different
membership packages. Although, to check out the emarketplace –
whether it is viable for your business or not – you might start
with the free membership package, but once you are satisfied
with your selection, to use the emarketplace to your advantage
you should choose the package with most features and functions.
Integrate your products to e-catalog If you are a supplier, this
is a very important step to take. Unless you have thousands of
products to sell, this should not be a difficult task. All
emarketplaces use either a form or wizard-based, not-so-complex
and user-friendly product adding tool. Since e-catalogs that
emarketplaces use are industry standard, once you aggregated you
products, same information you will be able to use in other
e-catalogs, emarketplaces and even in your own website.
Apart from your own buyers other prospective customers from the
emarketplace community are able to view your products in the
e-catalog, which in turn will bring you new contacts and sales.
Create products for sale offers You should create sales offer of
your primary products that you carry most of the time and post
them on the emarketplace. Many emarketplaces have options to
sell products with different procedures. You can make offer to
sell access inventories through dynamic market, also called
auction, you can make hot offers with time limit, etc. This is
an extra sales channel in the beginning, which might grow into
your primary one!
Involve your buyers and sellers If you would like to use an
emarketplace most effectively, you have to get your suppliers
and buyers on board too. Supply chain management solution that
usually comes with an emarketplace allows you to reduce
operational costs significantly.
- Encourage your buyers to send request for quote for a product
through the inbuilt system of the emarketplace.
- Make strict rules within your company to send all quotes
exclusively through emarketplace.
- Ask your buyers to send Purchase Orders to your company via
emarketplace.
- Bill all your clients using invoicing system of the
emarketplace.
- Manage shipping and handling though emarketplaces.
- Convince your suppliers to use the same emarketplace so that
even as a buyer you can get the benefits of a B2B exchange.
Complete adoption of an emarketplace will help a company gain
numerous benefits. The following figures taken from various
research notes emphasize the importance of e-marketplace in
today’s business world.
- Thanks to emarketplace, companies can reduce purchase order
processing cost from US $75 to less than US $10.
- By automating sales and customer support processes companies
can lower overhead costs up to 25 – 30% easily.
- Companies also can reduce more than five percent of their
maintenance, repair and operation by incorporating e-business
solutions, which are integral parts of any emarketplace.
- Business process automation using B2B emarketplace helps
companies decreasing of document errors from 20 percent to less
than one percent.
B2B Emarketplace solutions are great opportunities
The famous inventor Thomas Edison once told, “Opportunity is
missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work.”
Company executives are by no means afraid of hard work, but
unfortunately many of them have colossal fear of high technology
and because of this reluctant to explore new Internet-based
technologies to their advantage. If you are one of them, be
assured that knowledge required to adopt emarketplace to your
business and manage it properly is easy to learn and implement.
About the author:
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO
of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide
experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web
Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to
start and run online business. You can contact him at
mailto:nowshaderusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com,
http://www.rusbiz.com
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