When Keith Oliver, logistician and consultant, coined the term Supply Chain Management in the early 1980’s, he changed not only how businesses plan for more efficient manufacturing and inventory control, but he also opened the door to a degree of control, transparency, and ultimately innovation — that would have been impossible without his insight.
And yet, for all that development and creativity reaching back over 40 years, the processes within the business, especially within the core engine of commerce, have languished.
While businesses want to move faster, to respond to customer and buyer demands more quickly, to be more efficient and accurate in driving revenue, and more effective at managing risk, there are still too many disconnected processes, unintegrated technologies, and islands of inconsistent data.
These disconnected and unintegrated systems and data slow teams down, introduce friction in handoffs, and ultimately slow the wheels of commerce to the extent that business is lost, revenue leaks, and risk accumulates, unmanaged in hastily reviewed and signed contracts.
It’s a mess.
The Rising Urgency for a Connected Commerce Chain
Now, more than ever, businesses must respond to rapid and unpredictable changes in supply chains, in tariffs, taxes, product availability, and changing customer demands — quickly and with confidence.
They need a new way of connecting and managing every aspect of commerce inside their business. They need to be able to build a commerce chain.
A commerce chain carries the efficiency and responsiveness of the supply chain inside the engine of commerce - connecting every moment from when a customer first enquires about a product, through to configuring, pricing, quoting, contracting, delivering, and even renewal.
What it Takes to Build a Successful Commerce Chain
When built and utilized correctly, a commerce chain transforms how a business operates. Operational silos are eliminated, data is consistent and moves rapidly to the teams and processes that need it, contractual and vendor risk is identified rapidly, and the business moves faster to meet the needs of buyers without sacrificing control.
Of course, there are some foundational elements that define a business’ ability to create, manage, and maintain such a commerce chain.
First, the various technologies within the core commerce engine of the business must be connected and operating in synchronization. These include customer data drawn from CRMs, product data and material availability, pricing, vendor contracting, sales contracting, agreements, sales acceleration tools like quote and configuration technologies, rebate management, and so on.
Beyond Connection: Creating a Common Language for Commerce
If these technologies connect cleanly and efficiently, there data flows smoothly and efficiently. However, simply connecting isn’t enough. These systems must have a common language of definition, and common frame of reference for the meaning of terms like customer, product, price, agreement, and every other aspect of commerce.
Such a common definition is essential to enabling the level of connectivity required to create the responsiveness and agility businesses need to meet the challenges of so much change and complexity in markets.
When in place, a commerce chain accelerates the ability of teams from procurement to legal to operations to IT to sales to customer success and support, clearly identifying, engaging, and capturing opportunities faster than their competitors, at better margins and with less risk.
This is the promise of a connected commerce chain. Integrated tools within the infrastructure of a business, sharing a common frame of reference and semantic definition for the essential aspects of driving revenue and reducing risk, operating in concert, faster, more accurately, and more efficiently than is possible.
Turning Market Turbulence into a Competitive Advantage
Businesses that build such a commerce chain will win more business, no matter the market landscape. In fact, turbulent market conditions and unpredictable, rising complexity are no longer barriers to success, rather they become springboards for competitive differentiation.
With an effective commerce chain in place, such businesses can accelerate away from their competitors, who still languish with inefficient systems, silos of operation, and no clear source of truth for commerce data.
However, as powerful as a commerce chain is in delivering operational efficiencies, accelerating response, and driving greater margin and lower risk, this is only the beginning of the transformative power of such an approach.
Rather, there is an extraordinary, and transformation aspect of the commerce chain that delivers a level of strategic control and agility promising to unlock not just efficiency but market dominance and exponential growth.
A foundation built for the future
I’ll cover this in the next blog, but put simply, if the commerce chain defines exceptional business potential, and it does, then AI will be the key to unlock it.
