The Value of E-Commerce

Editor's Notes

• #24: One of the largest Career Education Companies in the USOwn and operate over 100 colleges across the US and Canada100,000 students and 8,000 employeesBrands include Wyotech, Heald, Everest and Quickstart
• #25: What are we buying?Who are we buying from?How much are we spending?We could not leverage buying power
• #26: What are we buying?Who are we buying from?How much are we spending?We could not leverage buying power
• #27: What are we buying?Who are we buying from?How much are we spending?We could not leverage buying power
• #29: Implementations and deployments are costly and time consumingWould be going from 30 users to 13,000, so something easy to use and uncomplicated
• #30: INTERNAL:Shift in responsibility Campus places order vs Corporate places orderCoordination between internal teamsInvolving AP, IT, Purchasing, Audit, ManagementEXTERNAL:Vendor EnablementCooperation of suppliers, willingness to change processes
• #32: THIS SLIDE NEEDS TO BE UPDATEDGood support from campuses/internal teams Cost of invoice processing went from $16 to $2
• #35: Ongoing vendor enablementOngoing improvementsNew projects: Budget Check, Invoice Conversion
• #44: It’s an honor to be a part of this panel today. As the President and CEO of Wolper Information Services for more than 20 years, I’ve become quite involved in the world of eCommerce and I’m thrilled to be able to share my perspective with you today.Oftentimes when people talk about eCommerce they are referring to eprocurement – or online transactions. Today, I would like to suggest that eCommerce is a much bigger topic that offers expansive and robust opportunities in commerce, generally, and in the use and dissemination of information critical to an organization’s success in this world of global eCommerce. Because of our experience in eCommerce and eprocurement, and because of what we do and the nature of our business, I’m going to be talking about the evolution of information in eCommerce and how your company can participate more broadly in this interesting and fast-changing world.
• #45: By way of background, let me explain a little bit about what we do and where our experience with ecommerce comes from.We provide acquisition and management services for magazine, journal and newspaper subscriptions, books and ebooks, in addition to other media and related information management tools. We handle content in all formats -- print, electronic and digital. For corporations, academic institutions and hospitals, government agencies and public libraries.  We are bascially behind the scenes – the engine that provides those resources – whether they arrive directly to the end user or to a librarian or an administrator. We’re an outsourcing solution specializing in the management of company-paid subscriptions and other content resources.  We have a cloud-based platform, WOLPERweb®, that allows self-management of those resources by our customers. That system also gives us the ability to integrate with Ariba, other e-procurement, accounting and library system platforms.  Our work was recently recognized for the second time by EContent magazine, who included us in their EContent 100 “list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry.”
• #46: The value of information today is more essential than it has ever been.In today’s knowledge economy, it’s what makes workers effective; it helps identify opportunities; it helps formulate strategy and plans; it helps research evolve and it helps organizations and their customers make more informed decisions that eliminate or manage dissonance.
• #47: I’m sure none of this data is news to you…What may be new is how I’d like to broaden the conversation about eCommerce.
• #48: Many people and organizations think of eCommerce as primarily transactional; that it’s exclusively about buying and selling.We associate eCommerce with some action in the marketplace. But my point is that that action doesn’t have to be a sales transaction. eCommerce is also about the availability and use and exchange of information:To support decision makingTo foster the exchange of ideasTo encourage serendipitous discoveryIt might exist within our own own closed systems.It might exist in connected social media and community networks.It can involve integration of data and information from multiple sources – towards many other uses and outcomes besides strictly buying-selling transactions.For example, if our eCommerce environment also provides information to a researcher, we hope certainly that eventually that information – and the work that happens around it – will lead to a new product or service. And certainly that involves commerce in the traditional sense, buying and selling.Another example might be very simply providing decision-support information to a customer in the eCommerce setting – perhaps reviews by other customers; that broader set of information or information services helps facilitate further sales transactions.
• #49: As we think about the broader eCommerce universe – including buying and selling transactions but also involving lots of other potential for information exchange – we recognize that information is only relevant if something happens with it. We want to think about all those other potential actions. Especially if we want to incorporate the broader view of eCommerce into our own initiatives.Consider these questions (on the slide).Also, consider the influence that the likes of Amazon and Google have had on our world. These powerhouses have set the bar for us by training people – users, customers – to expect simple, clean interfaces, powerful search capabilities, the ready availability of community and ancillary content – reviews, recommendations, tools such as shopping carts and Wish Lists.Also, rapid advances in technology and the internet itself have created certain expectations about connectivity and speed.So, from an eContent standpoint, an eCommerce audience expects information to be available, findable, linkable, maybe printable, email-able, etc. They will expect access to not only recognized aggregated “published” formats such as those we find under established brands (the Wall Street Journal, Supply & Demand Chain Executive, etc.) but also to the “micro,” widely dispersed but relevant information that might live in online reviews, blog posts, Tweets, Facebook comments. In your eCommerce platform, you might even want information to be available via live chat.And once we’ve imagined the nature and scope of our basic eCommerce platform, we also need to ask ourselves what other functionality, tools and information might add value. You needn’t build it all yourself. In fact, often it’s better to rely on other experts or existing repositories or systems. So your platform needs to allow integration with potential partner solutions.
• #50: As an intermediary in the content delivery supply chain, all of this has created significant changes in the way we conduct business.As the publishing industry changed from print to digital, we redesigned our internal systems to handle online services and we developed strategic partnerships with third party vendors to be able to offer a complete suite of information management solutions to meet the needs of the digital age.We created WOLPERweb, the first online cloud-based subscription management system in our industry.WOLPERweb supports the basic transactional functions our customers need, but it’s so much more than that. It provides our customers with access to the information they need to make their purchasing decisions. They can search for new serials, review pricing and place their orders. They can generate real-time reports to help them manage their total spend and they can communicate directly with our customer service team with any claiming or service needs they may have. And WOLPERweb integrates with the third party systems from our partners, to bring added value and more information to our customers.
• #51: From an environmental perspective, another benefit of ecommerce is that it can greatly reduce the amount of paper and natural resources used by a company. As an example, one of our customers saved over 2,000 pages per year by transitioning to electronic payments and electronic invoicing. And when we transition customers to digital or online editions of the content they purchase, the savings both in hard dollars and environmental resources are even greater.But big picture, all of this evolution contributes to enhanced organizational effectiveness and efficiency - around information management but also and around unleashing the power of information for better business decisions and an improved online customer experience.
• #52: Successful integration of eContent and eCommerce cannot contain the entire customer experience.Even with rich and ready availability of ancillary information and exchanges beyond the sales transaction, there will continue to be a need for personal, human involvement.Because it’s not possible to automate everything. It is not possible to anticipate every question.In our experience, specifically, content resources often defy too much automated service. Offerings are often unique, pricing is complex, and products have a lifecycle that needs to be managed well beyond the point-of-purchase. So, we at Wolper blend technology and personalized, human-to-human service. What we refer to as High Tech, High Touch.It’s a model that works well beyond our walls. Personalized service is the perfect match for excellent technology. For example, if a customer goes to a retail site and wants more information, they may want to speak to a person before making their decision. If there is a problem with an order they previously placed, they want to be able to interact with a person to get the issue resolved. Which site do they go to? I suggest that most of us would choose the site with easy access to knowledgeable and helpful people on the other end and multiple ways to access that assistance, including phone, email and online chats.
• #53: But going back to eprocurement as an important component of ecommerce, I want to address the value of working with Ariba, both to our company and to our customers. It’s a win/win solution for both the buyer and the seller.Using the Ariba platform allows for standardization of order data and eliminates ambiguity and/or potential errorsIt’s a “Win” for buyers/customers whose companies are looking to consolidate and expedite purchasing and to capture and track spend, including matching allocations back to cost centersAnd, Ariba punchout facilitates customer access into our fully featured customer-facing e-commerce site – so that they can engage in our services beyond simply the transactional, for example, while in WOLPERweb®, they can generate and analyze reports, edit information about subscriptions or subscribers, communicate questions or issues directly to us and access strategic partners products and services as well.
• #54: As we said at the beginning of this presentation, information is more essential than ever in this fast-moving, competitive business environment.Economic pressures are great, too, meaning that cost controls and ROI are also of paramount importance – thus the need for systems that expedite, enhance and expose our eCommerce activities. That includes both transactional eCommerce – eprocurement – as well as the broader view of eCommerce that supports other types of exchange with contextual, decision-support information, etc.And all of these things – the essential need for information, the economic pressures, as well as the opportunities we might take advantage of – to add greater value through partner integration – are just waiting to be corralled into a single, unified ecosystem that enables eCommerce in the broadest sense.