The giant Boeing Corporation of America is one of the more successful examples of re-intermediation. Where disintermediation is the buzzword that has come to mean the removal of the middleman, re-intermediation means that you replace that middleman with yourself; you become the intermediary for your own suppliers and customers. Boeing runs an electronic market place or EM in the USA. It has its own intranet or private network, as do many of its suppliers; it also has some very small and specialist suppliers who are not big enough to warrant an intranet. It also has customers. All of these are linked together in an EM where Boeing is the moderator. It maintains the links between all of its various suppliers and customers either via web links or private links. In this way, a single market place for the thousands of satellite companies and organizations which Boeing relies on is created. Boeing can monitor and control all the parts of its supply chain, from initial design through development and realization to purchasing, fitting and testing. It has an overview and a degree of control over how and when its suppliers and customers buy and sell. This gives it a power that extends much further than just purchasing power (where there are substantial gains to be made); it holds the ‘strings’ as it were, and has an overview that can help it in all phases of its business. This is B2B on a grand scale, but scale isn’t the only con­sideration. Businesses can link with other businesses in simple one-on-one partnerships and gain the benefits of this sort of set up – especially useful if you link with a business that is at a different stage of your own supply chain. For example, a furniture manufacturer might link directly with a timber merchant to their mutual benefit. The manufacturer has a guaranteed supply of timber, at an advantageous price. The timber merchant has a guaranteed market for the product. It is worth looking at your own chain of supply to see where such links can be made

Be your own developer

The ability to be your own developer still depends on your having a good business idea to develop – the idea must come first. What it does mean is keeping costs to a minimum by learning to do the different jobs yourself rather than hiring in anyone to do them. You could undertake to build your own web site, carry out your own design and minimize your outlay on anything expensive that does not pay its way.

 

 

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