Supplier Enablement

Supplier Enablement – are all SME the same?

SME represent 99.9% of all UK enterprises and not all of these are UK owned businesses, many are subsidiaries of foreign owned businesses. This distinction is made as some UK management teams may not have the final word on matters such as eCommerce that are decided by their Corporate HQ.

Thinking about the group that do have the final word on matters relating to eCommerce, is there any way to perform segmentation among this group as to their propensity to engage in eCommerce?

How do we normally perform segmentation? We group (e.g. all those in retail) then use size for comparison; number of employees, number of outlets, geographical presence, turnover, profit etc.

Are these useful? You might have a very successful business but with a management team that is unconvinced about the value of eCommerce to the business. So, minimal investment is made just to tick the box.

Is there any other way to perform segmentation? What if we understood some of the “soft” factors that influence how the business is run, attitudes toward customer service, innovation and so on?

What matters now is understanding what makes the business tick, such as:

- management style; we like to experiment vs. we don’t do that
- industry dynamics (regulated, unregulated, expanding, shrinking)?
- high volume – low margin, high margin – low volume business?
- is the business transaction simple or complex?
- are their intermediaries between you and the customer?
- is your customer’s supply chain highly automated?

I have experience of small companies with little understanding of eCommerce commit to trade electronically with their customers because it was important to their customer. Then again, large companies with very high competency in IT and eCommerce dilly dally over both the decision to commit and wrestle with the customer over eCommerce policy.

So it comes down to either a power struggle between buyer and supplier or simple economics (e.g. Supplier: I can’t afford to lose the business!).

For more information follow http://www.impaq.co.uk/

posted by FrankB @ Wednesday, May 10, 2006