E-business has become a primary market enabler so fast that it has sent traditional business into a tailspin. Brokers, like business owners everywhere, are struggling to innovate. The process is particularly confusing when a company tries to accommodate the Internet within their present business model. It doesn't work, costs money and creates frustration.

    The truth is, the business model on which most brokerages are based cannot be tweaked and turned a bit here and there. Rather, the entire business model needs to be realigned. To remain competitive and viable, the Internet must be looked at as a central platform for the core business of transportation, not just an add-on for automating the company brochure.

    With business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce now a full blown reality, brokers and smaller logistics firms need an e-commerce strategy. Having a plan helps direct the purchase of hardware and software. It dictates the kind of professional development that must be planned for staff. It may move marketing away from one audience and turn up an entirely new profit center.

    Web interfaces are becoming the most common front end to networked applications. The move is so pervasive that Web interfaces are quickly becoming the front end of choice.

    As an example, have you registered online yet to attend an event? Millions of people do. Speakers are being chosen, based on the content of their web site - which may even include video clips of their presentations. Instead of calling and asking about payment, some brokers can pull up their carriers' accounts payable on the Internet and find out whether the check has been sent. None of these interfaces were even available a few years ago. Now they are common practice.

    This two part feature presents a four step process to start planning your e-commerce strategies. Components include:

1. Customer-based Vision of Your Operation
2. E-business Implementation Plan
3. E-business Evaluation Plan
4. Budget

1. Customer-based Vision of Your Operation

    In the traditional model, you built your operation for convenience and effectiveness for you and your employees. It was formulated around your being in one location on the planet, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in your time zone, five days a week. You interacted, face-to-face.

    By contrast, an e-business strategic plan sets out an Internet-oriented, customer-focused vision for your company. The plan creates a framework for the innovative, flexible organization you will become. Engaging in the exercise of e-business planning forces owners and executives to think outside the 20th century box and become future focused.

    Forget the way you've always done business. That won't be easy. You've been thinking traditionally for all these years. Yet it is necessary. You may need help; people to keep bringing you back to the essence of the new work platform that is so foreign when you start addressing it.

    Today, it doesn't matter where people are located or what time of the day or night they work. They may be your employees, or someone else's or they may be entrepreneurs - outsourcers who with niches of knowledge. You communicate by machine, not in person. Sometimes it's faster and easier, sometimes not. But you must admit, it's different!

    You will not be taking incremental steps, when you start thinking about a new business process. You will be taking quantum leaps. You will rethink the way you do business, the relationships you have with vendors, the speed with which you can respond. You'll reinvent the benefits and services you provide and the audience to whom you provide them.

    If you keep thinking the way you always have, you won't be able to make the leap. You will keep getting dragged back to thinking the way you did when the telephone, fax and computer were your tools, without the Internet.

    To prepare you to think differently, read books on the subject. Subscribe to Fast Company magazine. Bring in some college seniors or graduate students and ask how they see things. Spend a few hours in a cyber café. Visit cybersavvy customers and collect intelligence on how they are operating today.

2. E-business implementation plan

    Implementation of an e-business plan requires consideration of numerous components:

          Technology blueprint
          Customer communication
          Technical integration
          Front interface
          Back end power
          Budget

    This is where you prepare for the future by creating utter chaos in the present.

    Your technology blueprint shows the kinds of technology you need to implement your e-business strategies. It includes software, hardware, networking, telephone service, high speed access to the Internet. It considers whether to have an ISP or ASP and who will host your website - not just for promotion, but to fulfill your business mission.

    It will be expensive, involved and eventually, liberating - but only eventually.

    A key factor will be the amount of customization you want to offer. One logistics firm, for instance, captures information on all the special service provided to each client during the month, at the time it is provided. Every solution that is applied, every change that is made that saves money, every innovation adopted is captured.

    Once a month, a newsletter is prepared - for each client individually. It does not report on industry trends or tell which staff members got married. It reports everything the third party has done to earn its keep for that client that month.

    How customized will you make your communication with your clients?

    Your implementation strategy will address the integration of Internet data with an organization's back-office systems. It will consider the vendors with whom you have or will have collaborative e-business relationships.

    Your new business model creates a structured approach to the redesign of existing business processes, functions, and workflow. It streamlines business processes. It eliminates duplication, removes redundancy and realigns functions with the technology strategy.

    Rather than entering data over here in the database, over there in the accounting system and somewhere else for marketing, all three functions will be handled with one data entry. Your implementation plan must assure that one system can talk through to another to accomplish your goals and fill your needs.

    You'll need to think about the future, as well as today. Make a list of those questions that should be answered in your e-commerce strategic plan. Here are some samples:

• What kinds of personalized information ( business intelligence) do you need to do e-business?

• What kinds of intelligence must you provide to your customers and clients?
      Status of freight movement?
      Payment history?
      Statistics on costs?
      Changes in fuel costs and their impact on shipping costs?
  Up-to-the-minute industry statistics? Increases in savings over time due to your manipulative expertise?

• Does the information need to be provided in real time?

• Can it be?

• Should it be?

• What are the ramifications of each decision you make?

• How could your best ideas come back to haunt you?

• How might you be cutting too deeply into profit to implement some of your more innovative ideas?

• Could collaboration allow you to provide them?

• If so, with whom should you collaborate?

• How sure are you about their dependability and ability to stay alive and well in the e-business environment?

• How can you self-empower clients to access information without your delivering it from one person to one person?

• Where and when should you make sure your service is still being offered one-on-one?

Annette E. Petrick is a business and marketing consultant to transportation companies - www.transportmarketing.com / anetrick@shentel.net / 540-459-8390 / FAX - 540-459-3440.