Once, it would have spent months haggling individually with dozens of vendors to supply printed circuit boards for various subsidiaries worldwide. Instead, UTC put the contract out on FreeMarkets OnLine Inc., a Web marketplace for industrial goods. On the Web, shopping's a snap.
Buyers can quickly compare information about products and vendors almost anywhere.
It's a world where the virtual distance between the producers and their ultimate customers has collapsed, sometimes to near zero. That's prompting a goodly number of producers to reach customers more directly by making an end run around the traditional channels. In many cases, buyers are starting to skip past the old industrial distributor and the neighborhood insurance salesman. They're providing a more direct conduit between producers and the ultimate buyers. And a much cheaper one.