While bringing tremendous opportunities, Internet shopping also poses a threat to financial control. Many householders have already discovered this fact. Businesses, also, need help to make best use of features such as the web’s high speed and vast search powers.
Getting it right can help product marketers cut costs and deliver innovations to market more quickly. However, the temptation to exploit potentially dangerous aspects of the web - such as to locate non-approved suppliers offering apparently better prices - can lead to serious problems.
Responsible suppliers must recognise these challenges facing their customers and provide innovative online tools, via their websites, that harness the best features of the Internet to provide a trusted source of competitive advantage.
Harnessing Search Powers
An obvious starting place is to enhance product-search capabilities for online customers. For component suppliers, this means providing parametric-search tools to help customers locate components meeting their exact specification. RS Components has built Component Chooser to provide this facility for its customers. Component Chooser is now the world’s largest and most extensive parametric search engine of electronic components. RS Components also provides online Technical Notes, situated at product level, which can provide answers to technical questions and help to inform purchasing decisions.
Expanded search capabilities are also valuable for products such as test equipment as well as industry-standard subsystems or modules. Searching the RS website automatically locates compatible alternatives of suitable quality; examples include families of RS own-brand products, which are conceived to deliver high value at extremely competitive prices.
For larger companies, in particular, coordinating aspects such as purchasing decisions, delivery arrangements and spending by multiple individual users is much tougher in the Internet age. Emerging generations of intelligent tools can provide the flexibility for individuals to purchase up to pre-set limits or to work within other constraints such as a limited supplier list. RS Components’ Purchasing Manager is an example of this type of tool. It allows companies to tailor access privileges and available facilities, and so match the purchasing needs of each individual’s role. Taking purchasing automation to a higher level, tools such as eProcurement use web protocols to open up communications between systems. This is another example of how the Internet is improving supply-chain efficiency by allowing customers to integrate their internal procurement systems seamlessly with the RS Components online store. This provides instant access to over 300,000 products, with live stock availability and the latest pricing information. RS is already expanding this service with enhancements to features such as the ‘My Account’ area.
Personalised Automation
In fact, customer self service, featuring facilities for customers to manage their own account and even personalise their purchasing environment, is a powerful aspect of internetbased commerce throughout the retail as well as trade sectors. Perceived benefits include increased customer satisfaction, reduced instances of errors and misunderstandings, and lower costs. Enhanced facilities for trade customers can include copy invoicing and online quotes, as well as the ability to place scheduled and forward orders. RS Components has already implemented these services online, which help avoid time delays and generally empower customers to improve control over their own orders, costs and administration. In addition, the RS Components Store Manager tool provides complete multivendor inventory management system, helping customers control spend and maximise stock efficiency.
On top of this, in situations where customers have negotiated special purchasing terms or prices, web-based purchasing tools now have the ability to apply these automatically to orders placed by any authorised member of the customer’s staff. Internet shoppers everywhere are also familiar with the power of price checking. With just a few clicks, it is easy to locate the best deal in terms of price alongside other important considerations such as availability, shipping costs and delivery time. Online price checking is also widely used by leading national retailers, and is now entering the industrial supply chain in facilities such as RS’ Price Checker price-comparison service. The service provides instant visibility of equivalent prices from alternative suppliers, which is frequently updated to help online customers assess the savings on offer.
Innovation-to-Market, at Internet Speed for high-tech companies, whose success depends on being the first to market, the Internet is opening up numerous opportunities at every stage of product realisation. Online technical communities sharing information and resources such as internet-based tools and open-source software are just the beginning. There is tremendous scope for web-based design to improve, not only by offering more powerful design resources but also by integrating more efficiently with commercial functions such as purchasing. The DesignSpark PCB environment provides an interesting example.
DesignSpark PCB is a free-of-charge Windows based EDA tool, created in partnership with a third-party specialist EDA vendor, which engineers can access online. It is compatible with industry-standard design-file formats, and hence allows engineers to access IP supported by commercial companies as well as designs available through open-source hardware communities. Consistent with its Internet-based nature, DesignSpark PCB includes its users within a dedicated social network providing access to information in using the tool as well as other aspects of PCB design.
The important aspect of DesignSpark PCB, from the purchasing perspective, is its ability to export a full bill-of-materials file that can be uploaded directly to the RS Components online quotation tool to fully cost a prototype or manufacturing run of assembled boards and then seamlessly order the necessary components. Driving this high level of automation into component engineering tasks that traditionally require a mix of technical and commercial expertise can simplify product realisation and speed up time to market.
Looking to Web x.0
As the mobile Internet is now a fast-spreading reality for business communities (as well as high-end consumer users) thanks to technologies such as 3G and Wi-Fi, smaller and more opportunistic design companies need to manage supply-chain services on the move. Supporting this trend, RS Mobile is a fully mobile transactional site that can be viewed on most smart phones.
The arrival of RS Mobile, as a next-generation online tool, reminds us all that the Internet is about change. As opportunities develop, the nature of any threats will also change. Switched-on suppliers have an important role to play through continual innovation of their online services to help their customers harness the power of the Internet while minimising associated risks.
Find out more about RS ePurchasing solutions at rswww.com/purchasing
Article by Carlene Garvey, RS components
Taken from eTech issue 5
