Key Findings

Business Drivers
Customer satisfaction is a major business driver for these automobile suppliers and manufacturing support firms. To this end, these firms see the Internet playing a key role in enhancing customer interaction and allowing access to information down the supply chain, while simultaneously reducing costs in some areas.

Customer Focus
Each firm that was interviewed saw e-business as essential to improving its relationship with its customers to remain competitive. While many trade articles appear to emphasize the potential cost reduction in the supply chain, that does not appear to be the driving force among these firms. Providing quality service and improving relationships with the customer are often cited as the top concerns.

Web-Enabling Customer Interactions (B2C)
With customers remaining their top concern, it is only natural that these firms hope to use e-business to improve these relationships by having the web provide very close customer interaction during the sales process. Since the sales process of these firms involves joint product design and specification development, they hope to use the web to improve this design process. Thus, web-enabled collaboration in business management and engineering and design, become critical areas for investment in web-based applications.

E-Procurement (B2S)
The drive to serve the customer better by anticipating and meeting the customer's needs is the primary focus of e-procurement. The firms hope to have access to real-time data on the customer's demand. With such access, they see a need to look down the supply chain and anticipate problems and address customer needs more effectively. The suppliers fall into three different categories; those that supply direct materials (which go into the making of the product), those that supply indirect material (referred to in the industry as MRO's), and those that support business operations in general. The firms envision the use of exchanges for some of the MRO's and other indirect materials, but do not see their relationship changing significantly with the suppliers of direct materials.

Organizational Impediments
Many firms have some uncertainty regarding the competitive value of e-business activities, but are willing to make investments if they can enhance customer satisfaction. They are also generally concerned about the impact of a free flow of information and several change management issues like perceptions, processes.

Competitive Value
While not all share the same level of optimism on what e-business has to offer, several firms see this as a way to stay competitive on the front-end (customer side), and to take advantage of some cost reductions on the procurement back-end (supply side). Some view this as a way to be more competitive by leveraging potential access to real-time order information and developing product designs interactively with the customers.

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