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Business executives are always looking for ways to get ahead. Complex matters – how to improve customer service, increase margins, reduce sourcing expenses ... or simply shorten cycle times – are by definition difficult to make educated decisions about. How can decision makers make use of important metrics that could shape their decisions and greatly improve their chances of getting ahead of the competition? What tools are at your disposal to increase sales, margins and customer satisfaction while reducing internal expenses?
Part of the answer lies in your B2B program, though probably not in the way you expect. It’s not just through reducing overhead and eliminating non-value-added functions, which are typical benefits of B2B/EDI. The key building blocks for improving your current performance are in the vast amounts of information contained in the transactions that flow through your network.
Everyone has heard of scorecards, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and business intelligence. Yet, according to Aberdeen Research (2005), only 31% of North American organizations have enterprise-level visibility of their procurement scorecard. Moreover, “60 percent of corporations in 2007 rely on manual tools to collect and analyze spend data, resulting in limited spend visibility and the inability to improve cost savings.” Clearly, there must be a way to improve this metric, since a large number of corporations are working with a B2B enabled supply chain for all the most important trading partners that they want to monitor on a daily basis. |
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