What Is Collaborative Commerce?

Collaborative commerce is the integration of partners with common business interests. It mainly realizes and meets the needs of growing customers by sharing information throughout the business cycle, while also meeting the company's own vitality. Through the integration of the competitive advantages of various partners, we can jointly create and obtain the maximum business value and provide profitability.

Collaborative commerce

Right!

Collaborative commerce is the integration of partners with common business interests. It mainly realizes and meets the needs of growing customers by sharing information throughout the business cycle, while also meeting the company's own vitality. Through the integration of the competitive advantages of various partners, we can jointly create and obtain the maximum business value and provide profitability.

Chinese name

Collaborative commerce

Foreign name

Collaborative commerce

Short name

cc

Nature

Next generation e-commerce system

Introduction

Collaborative commerce (hereinafter referred to as cc), it is known as the next-generation e-commerce system, and its basic idea was first proposed by Garnter Group in 1999.

concept

As far as the concept of collaborative commerce is concerned, the purpose of enterprise information construction is not only to manage internal resources of the enterprise, but also to establish a unified platform to include customers, suppliers, agent distributors and other partners into the enterprise information management system. Implement a series of efficient information sharing and business links. "Synergy" has two levels of meaning: the first level is the coordination of internal resources of the enterprise, the synergy between various departments, the collaboration between different business indicators and goals, and the coordination of various resource constraints. Such as the coordination between inventory, production, sales, and finance, these need some tools to coordinate and unify; the other meaning is the coordination of internal and external resources of the enterprise, that is, the coordination of the entire supply chain, such as customer demand, supply, Collaboration between production, procurement and transactions.

Emergence and evolution

The background prototype of the theory of collaborative commerce mainly comes from the "virtual enterprise" at the end of the 20th century. The theory of virtual enterprise mainly refers to the electronicization of each business process of an enterprise and the use of information technology to build a brand-new enterprise organization. This organization not only effectively integrates internal resources of the enterprise, but also realizes cross-enterprise cooperation. Achieve a dynamic business operation model. The cross-enterprise operating model is also spreading rapidly around the world. With the continuous advancement of this view, collaborative commerce has emerged. Specifically, it can be said that there are two major backgrounds: the emergence of collaborative commerce

social background

In this information age where competition is fierce and customer needs are changing, companies not only need to rely on reducing product costs and increasing response speed to ensure a firm foothold in a fiercely competitive environment, but also need to continuously acquire knowledge, enhance innovation capabilities and deepen Work together for success. Collaborative production, collaborative design, collaborative office, collaborative government affairs ... The emergence of the concept of "collaboration" and the application of systems based on this idea will push the information technology revolution into a whole new phase. In the e-commerce environment, it is difficult for a single organization to meet all the requirements of customers. Division of labor, core competence, and collaboration are the only way. Enterprises not only need internal cross-department coordination, but also need to resolve the cooperative relationship with suppliers, customers, and partners in the value chain. If companies want to reflect their advantages in the fierce market competition and meet customer requirements, they must establish a collaborative working environment. The establishment of a modern enterprise system by an enterprise has transformed the management model from a pyramid to a flat management. It has also emphasized the integration of internal and external resources of the enterprise, and deepened the collaborative work between employees and employees, and between departments.

Bloat of information

The amount of information processed by most enterprises is rapidly expanding, doubling every 12-18 months on average, and the growth rate of this geometric progression has indeed made many people feel at a loss. Now no matter where you go, information will enter your brain. Faced with so much information and information, companies urgently need a tool to process and organize.

Information island

For the process of enterprise informatization, it started with MRP, which focused on manufacturing management, and later incorporated human resource management, financial management, and other non-productive resource management to form ERP. ERP focuses on the management of internal resources of a single enterprise. It helps companies achieve standardized and standardized management by reorganizing business processes, but it is difficult to break through the organizational boundaries of enterprises, making it impossible for enterprises to communicate effectively through information and business. Collaborate and respond quickly to the market. During the period of the late 1920s, the rapid development of information technology, more and more information systems built inside the enterprise, more and more application systems served the enterprise or government department, which were used to solve Business problems. Due to historical reasons, most of them cannot communicate with each other. What traverses between applications are many different hardware environments, network environments, software environments, and database systems. The data format definition of the application system is so different, just as people in different countries speak different languages. These heterogeneous problems are the root cause of the "information silo" phenomenon that is often called. The existence of a large number of "information islands" hinders the information flow of the entire enterprise. The company cannot effectively integrate the existing resources, which seriously affects the competitiveness of the company and the improvement of government service capabilities. Cannot face the fierce international competition after China's entry into the WTO.

Unstructured information

For most companies, structured data only accounts for about 10% of the company's total information and knowledge, and the other 90% is unstructured data that is difficult for databases to access. For corporate decision makers, a memo, an email, etc. often hide very important information resources.

Non-personalized information

Enterprise managers, customers, suppliers, partners, etc., are all providers and demanders of enterprise information, and their perspectives and focus are different. Personalization is reflected in various aspects, such as: Content (general awareness / intelligence), frequency (exception / regular / continuous), structure (similar documents / documents from various sources), security (encryption / public), access (individual / team / company), integration ( (Internal / integrated / external) and so on. The current enterprise information system is often "one thousand people" and only realizes such a passive and popular way of providing information if you are willing to find it, anyway, And far from reaching the realm of personalized information access. The evolution of collaborative commerce When talking about the evolution of collaborative commerce, we must talk about the concept of e-commerce. E-commerce refers to the electronicization of the business process of an enterprise and the original The manual process cannot be implemented electronically to optimize it, thus creating a new business model and creating new profit points for the enterprise. The development of e-commerce It can be said that it is divided into three stages. The original e-commerce model was that an enterprise established an external website, published product information, and users realized online product inquiries, but could not establish some transactions. Later, due to the continuous improvement of information technology, a lot of Some interfaces with internal transactions of the enterprise have been developed to today based on the business process of the enterprise, reflecting the collaborative e-commerce of the upstream and downstream supply chain of the enterprise.

From the current perspective, the main content of collaborative commerce is mainly divided into four aspects:

Information and knowledge sharing

There are several aspects here: One is to associate the information of employees or users with their responsibilities and work. All information related to users is related, for example, documents created by employees in the company, and these documents are also Relevant to the employee's client, and related to the project the employee is involved in. Therefore, information is tied to the work of employees. The information inside the company is personalized. The information that employees need and the information that employees can get are related to their work. On the other hand, the information not only includes the information of collaborative commerce itself, it even includes the information of ERP and other systems, which are all integrated in collaborative commerce. Thirdly, content management must also be integrated into the entire system. As a collaborative business system, it is very important to externally disseminate its own products, such as publishing the latest company product information on the Internet, and establishing communication channels with customers. Maintenance of information on external websites.

Business integration

When employees in an enterprise or across companies need to work for a common goal, they all need to rely on the business as a whole. For example, when employees complete a product market design, they need to use market departments, customer departments, and even external advertising companies. Under such circumstances, the integration of the entire resources of the enterprise is required. The entire processing process of collaborative commerce is also an integration process of the internal business of the enterprise. Customers place orders based on online orders. Through the commerce processing process, the customer's needs are realized. The customer can also understand the overall business process processing status at any time through the self-service portal. Strengthened the ability to connect with customers.

Building a space for cooperation

During the operation of the enterprise, the employees of the enterprise need the assistance of other departments, and the performance is more general. When he needs some knowledge experts to answer or consult some of his questions, he needs to use such a space or community to carry out. For example, online conferences, online training courses, etc. On the other hand, the company s intensive work requires not only the assistance of internal employees to complete it, but also the participation of external users, such as customer participation. Employees need to continuously For the effective communication with external customers, the emergence of collaborative communities is also a part of the development of e-commerce, and also reflects the role of collaborative commerce.

Business transaction

Collaborative commerce must be able to provide secure and reliable business transaction processes, including customer order management, contract management, and financial transaction management. These transaction results can interact with other internal systems and update data.

Distribution of functional modules

A complete set of collaborative business systems includes multiple modules, each module has multiple components, and through integration, they form a fully integrated web-based solution. Including: enterprise information portal, knowledge document management, customer relationship management, human resource management, asset management, project management, financial management, workflow management, supply chain management. 1. Enterprise Information Portal Information Portal integrates all applications and data of an enterprise onto an information management platform and provides it to users with a unified user interface, so that users can quickly obtain personalized information and 2. Knowledge document management module e-Document stores and manages all kinds of information and transactions in a database. e-Document is the foundation for storing electronic data of enterprises, a platform for knowledge accumulation and sharing. 3. The customer relationship management module e-CRM integrates customers into the perspectives of service, sales, products, and finance, and truly obtains a 360-degree observation of customers. 4. Asset-product management module e-Logistics manages products, services, prices, assets and other information, and shares this information through the Internet and INTRANT. 5. Project management module e-Project manages project-related information, arranges project planning, supervises implementation, and monitors the project's fund operation. 6. The human resource management module e-HRM manages and maintains the organizational structure, position composition, and related information of each employee, and manages the user's role permissions and security levels in the system. 7. The financial management module e-Financials enters relevant data and forms various reports for management to analyze the organization's operating status and performance online. 8. Workflow management module e-Workflow According to the different organization and business process of the enterprise, it can flexibly customize the required work flow to realize the standardization, transparency and efficiency of business operation.

Collaborative information management

For a considerable number of enterprises, various software such as financial management, human resource management, project management, customer relationship management, and logistics management have been widely used. The internal elements of informationization (including ERP, CRM, SCM, OA, and online portals) , Electronic payment system and logistics distribution system, etc.) have been basically completed. However, these elements have not yet been integrated, and each information system is isolated. This has caused many new problems in enterprise informationization, such as information expansion, information islands, and information unstructured. The collaborative commerce system breaks through existing software and stores various enterprise data in different databases and application platforms, which causes difficulties for enterprises' actual information applications. It uses a central database to manage enterprise information, and data can be updated through any related applications. Or be extracted. From the application level, Collaborative Commerce comprehensively integrates all information, and there is no obstructive link between information and information. Users can extract a wide range and depth of information from the friendly interface entry of information resolution, without having to completely Between the database and the application platform. From the perspective of management, it is based on the idea of the enterprise resource mesh management system. It can easily extract all relevant information from any information point. All information and applications are multi-dimensional, three-dimensional, and powerful. Associated.

Collaborative business management

In actual work, the work of any department or individual of an enterprise affects all aspects. Only by letting these changing factors be updated and reflected in the system in real time, can the real business collaborative management be realized. For example, the sales action of the sales department involves customer feedback or orders, procurement by the purchasing department, receivables from the financial department, accounts payable, performance evaluation of the corresponding personnel by the human resources department, and management's analysis of the overall operation of the company Wait. The purpose of collaborative business management is to respond to changing factors in a timely manner at the relevant points involved. Collaborative commerce is important to achieve collaboration in business management. From the perspective of application, it uses the workflow between departments, cross-departments, and internal and external of the enterprise to drive the flow of knowledge, information, logistics, and capital flows within and outside the enterprise Obstacles flow and complete updates to related databases. As for the system itself, any one module can be regarded as the core of the system application level, and all other modules work around it to jointly complete the relevant applications it requires. From the perspective of management, since it is based on the idea of resource coordination, it realizes "point-to-point" and "cooperative operation". Changes in any one factor will be reflected at relevant points in the system and provided to the collaborative business platform. The various departments of the enterprise, as well as the external resources of the enterprise, enable the business processes to achieve efficient and collaborative purposes.

Collaborative resource interaction · Sharing knowledge and information

Enterprises can create their own knowledge base and implement a series of processes such as knowledge creation, organization, extraction and adoption according to the actual situation. Collaborative commerce integrates the existing knowledge and information of the enterprise, and through the information portal, customized information and applications are customized according to the requirements of each user, so that users can easily obtain relevant knowledge and applications. Through the collaborative commerce platform, employees within the enterprise can create, accumulate and share knowledge information, and customers, suppliers and external partners can also use this platform to achieve the purpose of knowledge information creation and sharing. · Customer collaboration Customer relationship management through collaborative commerce is not unilateral customer management, but rather allows customers to truly participate in it, thereby achieving all-round tracking and interaction with customers. Through a collaborative business system, companies can learn about customer information and needs in real time, so as to provide customers with personalized products and services. Customers can also update their relevant information through the system to understand the products and services that are most interesting to them. Relevant departments work together to complete purchases, service requests, and project implementation. · Partner synergy The relationship between an enterprise and a partner established through collaborative commerce is a "collaborative" relationship. Partners can obtain customer needs and market feedback in a timely manner, and can also share knowledge with the enterprise, so that the enterprise can obtain the optimal route of procurement, production and sales, reduce costs, improve response speed, improve enterprise competitiveness, and ensure more efficient Supply chain level and lower supply chain costs.

Application personalization

Through the collaborative business enterprise information portal, all applications and data of the enterprise are integrated on an information management platform and provided to users with a unified interface, so that the enterprise can quickly establish a personalization of the business to business and business to internal employees application. It provides business information to users everywhere, helping users manage, organize, and query information related to businesses and departments. Internal and external users only need to use the browser to get the data, analysis reports and business decision support information they need. The enterprise information portal breaks through the inefficiency caused by the "information ocean" and provides visitors with the most interesting and relevant information in a friendly and fast way.

Business Intelligence:

Collaborative commerce is not only a carrier of information, but also an analytical tool for information. Through the processing and conversion of data, it provides a series of tools from basic queries, reports and intelligent analysis, and displays them in a variety of ways. It examines operations, performance, and analyzes current problems and future development trends for enterprises. Business strategy, adjusting product structure, distribution channels, workflow and service methods to provide decision support.

Support business development and business process adjustment:

The corporate organizational structure, human resource composition, and workflow model of an enterprise will change with changes in the internal and external environment of the enterprise, and the collaborative business system has good scalability and powerful custom functions to adapt to the organizational structure and business processes. The need for adjustment without the lowest level of development greatly improves the flexibility and applicability of the system.

WEB-based structure

The collaborative system is based on WEB development and adopts the most popular B / S structure. The client only needs to install the IE browser to use the system. The system has the characteristics of ease of use, simple maintenance and 24-hour continuous service.

Status and trends of global collaborative commerce development:

Technology, function, application, service ... The globalization of the economy and the intensification of competition have gradually led enterprises to win-win cooperation. It is difficult for a company to compete with its competitors in all aspects depending on its own capabilities. From a macro perspective, competition not only exists between enterprises, but also extends to the supply chain and supply chain, and even between the value chain and the value chain. In the era of rapid development of networks and collaborative technologies, the cooperation of enterprises needs to complete collaborative commerce through the Internet. Therefore, the company must not only consider the integration of internal staff skills and department resources, but also consider collaboration with other companies to achieve cross-organization of processes in order to jointly improve the response speed to customers. This requires the use of information technology, the establishment of a collaborative environment between enterprises, the expansion of enterprises' reach and access channels, and the improvement of the flexibility of the entire supply chain. How to coordinate the many complicated business relationships between enterprises is a new issue for enterprise change management. The American GARTNER Group consulting company has divided the three stages of the application of information technology in business management:

In the first stage, information technology is mainly applied within a single enterprise; in the second stage, E-Commerce electronic transactions have become mainstream; and now, the post-ERP era with a distinctive label of "collaborative commerce" is in many enterprise applications and ERP software vendors The crowd came down.

The definition of the post-ERP era must be traced back to the two transformational factors of modern enterprise management, changes in corporate environment and changes in business processes. The strong influence of these two factors has forced the environment of the original closed enterprise to change to an environment with a professional division of labor and a large-scale production enterprise as the mainstream environment; the enterprise needs to design or adjust the workflow according to the concept of concurrent engineering to improve business processing Speed and efficiency. In this irreversible change, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) has increasingly changed the original system model to adapt to its development.

Coming change is synergy

The GARTNER Group consulting company in the United States made a three-phase division of the development and trend of information technology applications: before 1995, it can be said that it was the first phase of information technology applications.

At this stage, the application of information technology is mainly the application within a single enterprise represented by ERP. ERP is a transaction-oriented management system. By restructuring the business processes of the enterprise, ERP helps companies achieve standardized and standardized management, and accelerates financial statistics and other businesses. However, due to the limitation of the development of IT technology, the ERP system that was originally used to solve the supply chain management of enterprises was difficult to break through the organizational boundaries between different enterprises, and it was difficult for enterprises to effectively communicate with the market and respond quickly to the market through collaboration. Even within a company operating across regions, it is often difficult to build an enterprise integrated application due to the high system operating costs. Therefore, the ERP system has to be retired as an internal management system of the enterprise, helping the enterprise to realize the integrated management of capital flow, logistics and information flow.

Since 1995, due to the advent and popularity of the Internet, E-Commerce (electronic transactions) has become a mainstream application of information technology. The ERP system based on the Web technology at this stage has provided the possibility for enterprises to truly realize supply chain management by crossing organizational boundaries and geographical restrictions. At this time, the ERP system mainly expanded outward in two directions: one is the procurement management based on the Internet network, which realizes the online procurement business management between the enterprise and the supplier, including online procurement, bidding and auction, and anti-auction. The second is the customer relationship management system CRM, which is oriented to the management of the entire marketing process of the finished product, including the management of marketing activities, marketing processes and after-sales service.

In the new "new economy" era, the corporate and IT communities have sought a better B2B operating model-collaborative commerce. GARTNER Group even identified collaborative commerce as the mainstream application of information technology in developed countries in the first five years of the 21st century. The reason is that collaborative commerce can ensure the accuracy of corporate decisions and the high efficiency of the overall operation, and is especially suitable for cooperative manufacturing environments. For example, in a cooperative manufacturing environment, the design of a product may come from a professional design agency, and the manufacturing task will be undertaken by several manufacturers, and the related procurement may be completed by dozens or even hundreds of suppliers. The problem is how to coordinate design, manufacturing, and procurement activities, so that all participants can work together. A necessary condition is that they can share information and automatically connect related business processes. These are the issues that collaborative commerce pays attention to. The post-ERP era with the distinctive label of "collaborative commerce" has come down among a large number of enterprise applications and ERP software manufacturers.