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History of B2B systems

20 一月, 2016 - 15:30

Throughout most of our history, cities have been the generators of opportunity and wealth. In her seminal work of 1984, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs argued that “economic life depends on city economies;” because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities'[5]. Thus, economic activity requires the bringing together of the producers of goods and/or services, their suppliers, and their customers. Historically these groups are brought together in physical proximity - this is called agglomeration. This agglomerative process resulted in the development of cities throughout the world. This was true because with the limited communications and transportation systems of earlier times, businesses generally needed to be physically near to either their suppliers or their customers, and preferably near to both. But the last quarter of the twentieth century saw the decline of the industrial output of many of the worldís great cities and the transfer of this production to other parts of the world. This was possible as improvements in transportation and communication systems began to counter-balance the need to for businesses to be co-located in cities. However, the trend towards greater separation between suppliers, producers, and customers (also called globalization) has increased the volume of paperwork, and its attendant expense, needed to produce and sell goods and services. If you are importing raw materials from one country, producing your goods in another country, and selling your product around the world, you can no longer simply walk across the street to talk to your supplier about what you need or to deliver your product to your customer (refer to Figure 11.3).

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Figure 11.3 Global supply chain 
 

Traditionally, the method of exchanging data between members of a supply chain has been through the use of paper-based systems. As discussed, paper-based systems are inefficient because they are both slow and expensive to maintain. B2B systems were first used to replace these inefficient paper-based systems with the electronically exchanged data. This was much faster, and because it involved less manual processing of that data, it was also much more cost-effective. Seen from an economic perspective, these early B2B systems improved a company's processes for ordering supplies and paying for the ordered supplies - this is a simple application of Transaction cost theory, where the efficiency of the individual transactions are improved in order to reduce the overall cost of production. But, in addition to efficiency improvements, modern B2B systems also provide increased opportunities for finding even better suppliers and for reaching out to more customers. Thus, modern B2B systems are also improving the effectiveness of a firm's supply chain.

The earliest B2B systems used proprietary systems which, while an improvement over the paper-based systems that they replaced, were still relatively expensive to operate. The advent of the Internet has led to new and improved technologies for B2B commerce that are less expensive and easier to implement. Thus, the current rapid growth in Internet-based B2B commerce is based on the twin facts that electronic exchange of data is more efficient than the traditional paper-based exchange and that Internet-based technologies are less expensive and simpler to implement. The arrival of Web services appears to promise an even closer integration of the corporate systems that run modern business organizations. This may call for new models of cooperation between members of a supply chain.