Question & Answer: 1. Contrast B2B portals with B2B market places.   2. What are two process innovations enabled by effective collaboration within supply networks?  …..

Both B2B marketplace and B2B portal have the same core idea of doing marketing online but here are some points on which they do differ.Online marketing needs less investment and efforts but bring more profits.It will save lots of our time and travel expenses

B2B portal:

1.) It is a portal on which a large number of manufacturers ,wholesellers, retailers and dealers can find and communicate with each other regarding their products at the same place .

2.) B2B portal is a global platform where after registration one can find all the other organisations related to his industry.

3.) All your products will be listed along with your competitiors

4.) Examples of B2B portal include MSC direct, Grainger, Massy Furguson

B2B marketplace:

1.) In B2B marketplace we can list our products while uploading the pictures and specifications of our product then the marketing of only our product is handled by the provider.

2.) B2B marketplace is a two sided platform connecting professional sellers to professional buyers.

3.) It deals mostly in promoting of our own brand online.

4.)They come in 2 categories a.) Open or generalist marketplaces like Alibaba, EC21 b) vertical or curated marketplace like Joor, Bonagora.

2.) The two process innovations enabled by effective collaboration within supply networks are

a.)Just-in-time production : As the name suggests Just in time production implies that the raw products will only be recieved when they are needed in production.It is an inventory preparation strategy. Taiichi Ohno is believed as father of Just-in-time production.Initially it was introduced in Toyota manufacturing plants.

Purpose of JIT Production. The main purpose of JIT production is to increase the efficiency and reduce the wastage that is associated with the producction.Moreoever,it reduces the burden of overinventory and the cost of keeping the raw materials till production time. But this method also requires producers to forecast demand accurately because if there is shortage of raw materials the production can be halted in between.

b) Vendor-managed inventory : Vendor-managed inventory is a family of business models.In Vendor managed inventory the vendor or the seller takes full responsibilty of the materials that are required by the buyer.The quantity of the inventory is agreed prior to the production.A third party can also be included to adjust the demand and supply gaps.This model is successfully tested by Walmart and many other huge stores over the world

Purpose: The main purpose of VMI is to reduce the risk of a sudden shortage of inventory requirede for production.It assures the supply chain to be continued as agreed.

3.) Supply chain planning in simle words is to plan the supply of goods as from where the goods will come .

It is the method of syncing Demand Plan withSupply Plan and Operations plan with Business plan so as to achieve maximum Profit and business Growth.

A lot of things are to be consirdered while doing the plainning like which raw material should be bought from which place along with taking the advantage of market price break,how much raw materials has to be bought in advance to kick the production etc.Demand and supply changes should also be considered while doing the Supply chain planning.

Planning is done to reduce the latency of recieving goods as much as possible.

Supply Chain Execution is the actual execution of our planning .It is like real time implementation of our planning.It includes the flow of processes included in supply chain.

It can be partitioned in stages of planning, execution and shipping.

A lot of things have to be considered in this phase like minimizing disruptions to the production .Rerouting the process which didnt get aligned as per the planning .Procurement of newly occured requirements via interjection of managemet.

Purpose of supply chain execution is to make the production as per schedule even it requires some modifications in our pre planned setup.