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.