In a very real sense, software is the glue that links the hardware, the new economy, and the bottom line. These techniques offer companies a wide array of opportunities for decreasing costs and increasing revenue by changing the landscape of economic relationships among companies. In short, collaborative commerce allows for complete economic cooperation among a company, its suppliers, distributors, customers, and partners. The mindset changes from one of competition or indifference to one of cooperation and partnership. Carried to its logical outcome, the evolution to web-based collaborative commerce ultimately enables a dynamic virtual enterprise.
Customers benefit too.
Fed Ex collaborates with its customers so that they can check the status of their shipments online. Large and small enterprises are attracted to this model as a means to go beyond traditional supply chain models and to integrate knowledge sharing among those in the web. This allows all participants to better leverage the Internet to increase profitability. In fact, industry analyst Gartner Group believes that web-enabled collaborative commerce applications will become the one of the most important software contributions of the next decade. One reason is that the new collaborative commerce model offers a value proposition far in excess of earlier approaches by delivering significant and tangible benefits.