Week 6: Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce

The value and impact of business-to-business e-commerce are not as easy to measure as business-to-consumer e-commerce. As Subramaniam and Shaw pointed out in their article, eight factors affected the value of a Web-based B2B procurement system. These eight factors are type of process, complexity of process, size of the business unit, dominant type of B2B process, degree of centralization, integration of e-proceurement with enterprise systems, participation of business units and partners, and industry fragmentation. Based on these eight factors, the authors provided eight propositions. All teams offered their assessment of the eight propositions. For the most part, all teams agreed with these propositions. Team1 used the procurement process of Union Pacific as the example to justify why it agreed or disagreed with the propositions. The discussion showed that while these propositions might be theoretically sound, some propositions might not be valid in certain organizations.