Ariba's Commerce Services Network offers finance sourcing, payment and sales tax services for a number of large exchanges, said Martin Boyd, director of product marketing at Ariba. They may not have the resources to bring all of these value-added services to the exchange quickly, so we provide one place where they can get them. Even for sites that have cracked the initial procurement nut, a number of functions are still missing. For example, many sites offer simple auctions for commodity items but no easy way to facilitate complex negotiation of requests for quotes or longer-term service contracts. Direct materials are the raw materials, such as steel or parts, that go into a company's final product.
Indirect materials are items such as office supplies and travel services.
TradeAccess offers a database that communicates and stores data from each stage of the negotiation so that buyers and sellers can create complex contracts and refer back to the negotiated terms during the life of the pact, Conklin said. Shipping and logistics are another area where exchanges come up short, experts said. While most exchanges offer some ability to track shipments in transit, many don't offer sophisticated logistics capabilities that would let them find least-cost transportation methods or combining transportation costs from multiple sellers. So far, only a few of them are really fulfilling that potential. And while some e-marketplaces may offer sophisticated procurement capabilities that work in the United States, most have yet to deliver services that would let them complete transactions across international boundaries, where customs, currency and language differences often create obstacles to B2B commerce.