The interest on B2B e-commerce has been increasing rapidly since 1998. In Korea, government-driven B2B project for forty industries, which include electronic, automobile, steel, and so on, has been carried out by Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Ene...
The interest on B2B e-commerce has been increasing rapidly since 1998. In Korea, government-driven B2B project for forty industries, which include electronic, automobile, steel, and so on, has been carried out by Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy since 1999. The goal of the project is to promote e-Transformation of industries and support to build e-business infrastructure such as classification system of parts and products, electronic catalogue, and electronic document.
Even with Governments support, its true that many problems should be solved to activate B2B e-commerce in Korean industries. Among those problems, the most urgent one is to activate the B2B e-commerce standardization. In Korea, lack of standardization is the biggest obstacle to activate e-commerce. As standardization paradigm is changing from standard to strategic standardization management(SSM), standardization has more impact on business(or enterprise) management.
Accordingly, this study regards standardization as an preceding essence to activate B2B e-commerce, examines obstacles in standardizing electronic documents in ten B2B industries, and presents alternatives to accelerate the B2B e-commerce standardization.
The result of survey analysis shows that uncertain outcomes of investment, burdens on investment, insufficient refinement of business processes in managerial side are major obstacles in standardizing electronic documents. Also difficulties in system integration, lack of applications, shortage of IT personnel in technological side, insufficient standardization of business processes and codes, insufficient support in improving enterprises infrastructure, lack of support policies on electronic transactions, insufficient laws and systems on electronic transactions in political side, low participation of business partners, unclear business activities, conflicts among enterprises, conflicts with existing business partners, exposure of price information in social side are pointed out.
In consequence, alternatives to solve these problems are presented: to operate standardization leading group by industry, to support B2B e-commerce resources and infrastructure selectively and in priority, to build digital culture in company-level and collaboration culture in industry-level, to restructure SC(Sub Committee) from public-centered to civil-centered and operate SC groups for efficient and horizontal communication. These focuses on changing current government-driven B2B project to civil-driven and standardizing B2B e-commerce by market principle.