| dc.description.abstract | "Technology is reshaping economies and transforming
business and consumers.
This is about more than e-commerce, or e-mail, or e-trades.
It is about the "e" in the economic opportunity"
- William Daley
This study investigated the services offered by a B2B e-Market place and explored the
impact and challenges faced by member organizations of an e-rnarket as well as the emarket
itself. It involved a case study of an e-market in Kenya called E-sokoni.
E-sokoni was chosen because it is a developed B2B e-commerce hub with a membership
of six buyers and three hundred and eight suppliers as at the time of this study. It has
been in operation for over three years since the year 2000.
The results obtained portrays that 75% of the supplier members joined E-sokoni to
reduce operational costs, 65% to access more customers and 75% to reduce sales and
distribution costs. On the side of buyers all the buyers joined E-sokoni to both reduce
operational costs and reduce procurement expenses.
Services offered by E-sokoni include Electronic market exchange, Business process reengineering,
Supply chain management consultancy, Inventory management advisory and
Web marketing. Over 60% of the suppliers considered all these services important while
all the buyers censidered Electronic market exchange and Business process reengineering
significant.
Only 6% of suppliers have over 5% of their sales going through E-sokoni while all the
buyers have over 20o/~of the purchases coming through E-sokoni. This is attributed to the
fact that most of the buyers migrated with their suppliers to E-sokoni hence a higher
percentage of purchases coming through E-sokoni for buyers.
Generally for the suppliers B2B e-commerce has resulted into reduced supply chain time
attributed to delivery of products in time and order processing has improved because of
real time exchange of information. For the buyers, joining E-sokoni has resulted into
elimination of intermediaries resulting in delivery of purchases in the right time, quantity
and quality.
Sellers pointed out that staff requires training to enable implementation of B2B ecommerce
or otherwise new skilled staff members should be hired whereas buyers
pointed out slow connectivity speeds, poor electronic payment systems and poor
infrastructure as the main obstacles.
Generally it can be concluded that from the case study research carried on members of Esokoni
it is evident that B2B e-commerce does create a positive impact to the business
performance of the member organizations. Nevertheless there are obstacles which require
to be ironed out to reap the full benefits of this new technology of doing business . | en |
