Adding Value to B2B Commerce

Lean Principles

eLogic applies to the B2B Commerce process many of the Lean Principles first advanced in manufacturing. We see the sales process as an "information factory" responsible for the manufacture of on time, high quality quotations, proposals, contracts, orders, and status information.

These concepts act as our guiding principles for helping companies achieve the highest levels of improvement in productivity, quality, profit margin, and throughput across all commerce processes. We have developed proprietary tools and methods to ensure that the commerce improvement initiatives our clients undertake will provide results that conform to these principles:

Identify the Value

Identify the value your company adds from the customer's perspective. Each customer has differing product and process needs. For any given product or service, what is it that the customer values? What are they willing to pay for, and why do they choose to come to you?

Eliminate Waste

Once the customer's definition of value is understood, Value Stream Mapping techniques are used to analyze every step in your sales processes. Is every activity adding value from the customer's perspective? If not, it should be automated or removed. Typical examples of non-value steps are validations, approvals, status logs, and manual calculations.

The best metrics available for gauging B2B commerce activity are "cost per quote" and "cost per order". These costs go down when throughput and capacity increase without a comparable increase in required resources. Taking waste out of the process will automatically increase throughput and capacity.

Information Flow

Work should never sit in queue. It should be in constant progress toward the final goal.

Several types of queues routinely appear in commerce processes, preventing continuous flow of information. Examples include late arriving documents that must wait for the next business day, department backlogs, and serial processes that really should be executed in parallel. A commerce solution should be designed to reduce or eliminate these delays. In many cases, automating a well designed process will result in a "lights out" solution where no delays arise because no manual intervention occurs.

Demand Driven

Do the work when there is customer demand for it. In the context of B2B commerce this means that a company should leverage every opportunity to use rules-based automation "engines" to derive commerce information at the time of the customer request, rather than pre-define and pre-load large volumes of static data.

Error-proof Activities

Commerce transactions consist of a series of activities performed by several groups. These activities must be completed correctly and completely before the transaction is allowed to move to the next step in the process. Design the process, build the business rules, and structure the data to eliminate errors and prevent process loops.