Over the past couple of years there has been a significant convergence between the automotive and high tech industry sectors.  Satellite navigation systems, entertainment systems, mobile phone and iPod integration, today’s consumer is partly helping to drive the convergence of the automotive and high tech industry sectors.  So I thought it was about time I found out a bit more about the high tech sector, particularly in Europe.

Last week I attended a meeting hosted by CompTIA, the Computing and Technology Industry Association, in Brussels. CompTIA have been around for 25 years now and along with EIDX in North America and EDIFICE in Europe, they provide an invaluable service to companies looking to implement or manage B2B infrastructures in the high tech industry sector.  This particular meeting was hosted by Ingram Micro and it had good representation from companies such as Computacenter, Toshiba and Dell to name but a few.   

The main theme of this event was to discuss why companies were struggling to implement B2B technologies and what could be done to overcome these adoption barriers.  There were a number of presentations during the course of the day and many drew the same conclusions as to why companies were struggling to adopt B2B technology.  One of the main barriers was a lack of awareness of the benefits and technology that are employed within a B2B environment.  In terms of awareness, one of the interesting ideas to come out of the sessions was to establish some form of certification process for employees of companies that were thinking of implementing a B2B environment.  In many other industry sectors, employees are provided with training in using specific systems or are put through recognised accreditation to specific industry bodies.  A suggestion was put forward that perhaps CompTIA could pull together a B2B accreditation programme to ensure that employees of companies know about the latest B2B technologies and best practices and would therefore be able to identify areas of a business where B2B technologies could be implemented. 

I had an interesting conversation with a researcher from the Henri Tudor Institute based in Luxembourg.   They had developed a software tool that allowed a company to map out, visually, all message transactions between trading partners and then actually run a visual simulation to see what would happen as the transactions flowed around the ‘virtual’ company. Such a tool could help sell, or make a company more aware of, the benefits of B2B before they have implemented any B2B technologies. This tool could easily be adapted to help a company evaluate the ROI that could potentially be expected by replacing old manual processes, such as invoicing, with an electronic B2B solution. 

There was also a presentation from SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area, an initiative to try and standardise the e-Invoicing process across Europe.  Not an easy task when you think that each country in Europe has a different tax law and each government has a different approach to improving B2B adoption in their respective countries.  For example e-Invoicing adoption levels in the Nordic countries, ie Norway, Sweden and Finland is far higher than any other country in Europe. This is mainly due to government pressure for companies to remove paper from their invoicing process and making local tax rules and regulations easier to navigate through from an e-Invoicing point of view.  

ComputaCenter also provided an interesting insight into the challenges they faced when dealing with software companies who had complex or inaccurate product data in their price lists.  Computacenter suggested inviting software companies to their next meeting to see if there was a way that they could work together to simplify the exchange of information between hardware and software technology companies.  For example if Computacenter could receive just 15 pieces of information or attributes to describe a software product, rather than the 100s of variants they receive at the moment, then it would improve their B2B process no end.  Product Data Quality is becoming increasingly more important within the high tech sector and this example from Computacenter highlighted the trend very well. 

The day was concluded with a discussion panel, this was originally made up of myself representing GXS, OB10, Apple and Inovis.  As Apple and Inovis did not turn up to the event at all, Ingram Micro and GE EDF took part in the discussion panel instead.  Again, the theme of the discussion was to find ways to increase B2B adoption levels and each of us went into our thoughts as to how this could be improved.  B2B Outsourcing was seen as a key way for companies to remove the barriers to B2B adoption and not having to worry about how to manage a B2B infrastructure. They could just get on with their day to day activities and leave the management of their B2B infrastructure to a vendor such as GXS. GXS provide B2B outsourcing services to companies of all sizes, no matter where they may be based in the world.   

So this was an interesting meeting to attend, especially when trying to appreciate the B2B challenges that some of these technology companies faced and how similar they were to challenges faced by companies in the automotive industry.