What is the value to sellers in participating in your spend management or collaborative finance initiative? Increased customer loyalty, increase revenues, decreased costs, and greater visibility. But how many sellers understand these values, and how do you communicate them to your supply base? Hear from leading sellers as they share their secrets on how they’ve achieved unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction, increased revenues, and reduced costs. Gain insights into how to translate their wins into messages for your vendors.
We do recognize that many of you are here because you have to be. That your customer has approached you and asked you to change the way you do business. Many of the suppliers on our network start out that way – they join the network at the encouragement of their customers. What they soon find is that similar requests come in from other customers. They start to become more proactive, putting resources and processes in place to support these requests. The most advanced suppliers on our network view the B2B channel as a strategic initiative and collaborative work with their buyers to leverage it. Buyer-facing message: Let’s talk about the suppliers, and understand their reaction to this. When you talk to suppliers, you are asking them to change the way they do business, and some of them don’t want to do it, because they don’t want to change. They may come back to you and try to convince you to do business the old way. But if you let them do that, you aren’t helping your supplier evolve and stay competitive. eBusiness is here to stay, and you can help your supplier by engaging them in this initiative. And you may get pushback on the Ariba Network fees, but few suppliers are required to pay them. Out of 185,000 suppliers, 60,000 are transacting at any given time, and of these, less than 20% (11,000) are paying Ariba anything. So supplier pushback isn’t about the fees – it is about the change management. But what suppliers will find is that they will begin to handle other requests, they put in place process and resources, and they start to develop a strategy around it. You can help them evolve and understand the value.
The first thing we discovered is that over 92% of the companies we surveyed were engaged in at least one eCommerce initiative. eCommerce has reached critical mass. Even more telling however, is that 21% see eCommerce as a strategic initiative within their company and regard it as a key growth opportunity for their company.
Q3: Thinking about all of the IT purchases you have made in the past 12 months, what percentage of those purchases have had each of the following channels as the predominant channel used throughout the process? What percent of your purchases do you think will use each of those channels as the predominant channel in the purchase process looking out 2 years into the future? Although 28 to 31% may seem like a small increment in terms of revenue for IBM this is a considerable shift.
Notes: *Samples size ~1,200; eProcurement adopters defined as clients that in that year have a WEB transaction; Only customers with a wallet share greater than 0 (active customers) were considered While “Web Enabled Revenue” is a useful growth rate metric, used discretely it does not drive the appropriate behaviors to maximize value to IBM and our Customers Increasing Wallet Share is a demonstration of incremental value and implicitly a result of client satisfaction wit IBM hence, directing more spend to IBM. Aligns with clients’ stated policy of channeling spend to their e-enabled / preferred suppliers Table below shows MIP School of Management’s findings* comparing Wallet Share between customers adopting electronic means of purchasing from IBM Vs. non adopting customers. Majority of IBM’s online enabled clients are ‘basic’ boardings at the start of the Value journey meaning significant value is still to be realized Web Sales currently plays the parallel roles of supporting client requests / mandates for enablement, and motivating client opportunities to advance