Earlier this week I visited with a current client, which is one of my favorite parts of the job.  The person I was meeting with has been with the company about 6 months, and had very recently acquired B2B/EDI responsibilities as a part of their role — because the internal customers were very unhappy about the current state.

Like many of the larger companies I meet with, this client has “outsourced” operations to another provider, meaning all of the technical IT staff that do the work are employed by the provider.  The provider had already formulated a plan to “fix” the B2B/EDI issues by restructuring the program to reduce cost.  Unlike many people cast in a similar role, this director decided to revisit exactly what customers meant by “broken”.

After much research and discussion, this was what the director learned about what his internal customers wanted from his B2B team:

  1. Available resources.  On “sell-side” programs, EDI/B2B should be implemented as soon as a customer that wants it is signed.  The metric here would be close to start of implementation.
  2. Rapid implementation time.  Starting fast is not enough, partners need to be implemented rapidly.  Metric here is implementation days.
  3. Quality.  On sell-side programs there are often financial penalties (chargebacks) for quality defects — and there is also loss of reputation.  Quality matters in B2B.  Normal quality metrics apply.
  4. Cost.

The director’s observation was that the only factor being addressed was #4.  Cost is certainly important, but it is not enough, and not even in the top 3 concerns. 

I don’t think this story is unusual — except for the part where the director went out and extracted the real issues from the clients.  I have seen many B2B/EDI programs attempt to reduce cost, only to unintentionally impact some other key factor that only seemed important looking back.  I think the list above is a very fine basis for understanding what internal customers want…