It’s Time for Businesses to Jump on the Collaboration Bandwagon
September 12, 2015 – B2B collaboration on a mass level has begun since the late 1980s. Various industrial segments of manufacturing, retail, healthcare and financial services adopted integration solutions to boost their business. However, the advent of information technology and the development of World Wide Web has amalgamated the global market in such a way that it has now become imperative for the businesses to collaborate in order to deliver the best service to their customers. The companies that still focused on a non-cooperation agenda were left behind by their newer competitors and were then forced to change their stance on collaboration.
The inter-connectivity has made most of the target markets of the world technologically and geographically diverse and very susceptible to change. It constantly shifts patterns, which makes it harder for a single business to oversee the fluctuating needs of people. The business environment has touched such a huge level of complexity and uncertainty that has been unparalleled in history.
What happened is that that the customer has become more informed of the qualities of the product, the choices are always in front of him and he can compare different brands based on the assessments of their past customers. To deal with such a massively challenging audience, businesses have started joined projects, which ultimately provide mutual benefit for both of them. There are many successful examples of collaborative marketing campaigns, which have catered the specific local audiences towards which some multinationals could not have access.
Since on social media, you do not have to spend much time and efforts on creating exposure, it has created a tremendous opportunity for supplier and vendor firms because they now have more space to showcase their distinguished services. Further, the freeness of discussion on social media enables businesses to engage directly with suppliers and assess the best fit for their business. This phenomenon has caused rapid growth in collaboration in supply chain function of different businesses.
According to Gregory Hedges, M.D. Provity, Menlo Park, “The conversations about social media are happening all the time. We’ve seen it on the business to consumer side and you see it even on the business-to-business side. And leveraging it is a strategic choice that supply chain executives consider all the time.”
Perhaps the utmost advantage of online business-to-business collaboration is the ease in accessing the data stored by a firm. Through data mining, different companies can access and assess their combined data and formulate strategic reports, which can forecast market fluctuations for mutual gain.
Up till now, B2B collaboration has spread to the extent that according to a survey by Aberdeen group, 83% of the industry giants have implemented it as a business process. 18% of those 83% have been using online technologies to sustain B2B for over a year while nearly half have been using it for over two years. Its significance is disastrous to ignore for an organization of this era if it wants to grow and remain competitive in the coming years. B2B collaboration pervades into every aspect of business transactions and has become a must-have, instead of being an option.
Editor’s Note: b2b collaboration has been embraced by the business-social media innovator, WinWinUSA. Visit and sign-up your business to explore this growing segment.
