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Latin Trade, August, 2003 by Greg Brown

Refocus. Villasante and Zabal then started developing the product for the retail industry, what Villasante calls "sort of a low-hanging fruit" because retailers already understood business to business relations, since they buy so much, but also challenging, since retailers already had methods for communicating with their larger clients. The Mexican developers looked for ways to provide services every company would need, such as social security payments, distance learning and credit bureau reports. But they eventually refocused on sectors, branching from retail to insurance and now the automotive industry. "We started to realize that the small businesses in general were more interested in industry-specific issues," Villasante says.

Victor Gualdi is systems manager for 96-store grocery chain Supermercados La Anonima in Buenos Aires. The company has stores from Ushuaia to Cordoba, including nine distribution centers, which they have begun to link using bCentral.

La Anonima used to use an industry-specific software to register suppliers, but their success at getting suppliers onboard topped out around 20 suppliers, automating just 40 documents a day, around 5% of their normal flow of communication. In August 2002, the supermarket chain switched to bCentral, had it fully running by October and by December, 40% of the company's documents were online. By May, it was 85%. The company has almost 500 accounts in the system, or 90% of their suppliers, about as many as Gualdi expects will ever migrate to the new way since some companies, such as textiles makers, simply have too many idiosyncrasies in their products to go fully online.

The key, Gualdi says, was helping small suppliers to cut costs by connecting to the larger company through the Internet and familiar office software. "From the point of view of the supplier, the software is really simple," says Gualdi. "There's no need to train them."

Between 3,000 and 5,000 companies actively use the service, connecting to a series of hubs around Latin America using bCentral technology, Villasante says. The software takes advantage of the familiarity most small businesses already have with Microsoft's business suite, called Office, the most popular--and most widely pirated--business software on the planet. "Microsoft has a high level of piracy. People use Office but don't really pay for Office," says Villasante. "The focus was to actually produce value around these tools, to make it a more reasonable proposition to use and pay for the software and service."

Scaling up. Dense, complex data from big companies, such as an order for goods from suppliers, for example, is sent to a bCentral hub. There, it gets munched down into a format that can be read by anyone using Office's Excel spreadsheet program. Getting the data is not unlike downloading e-mail, says Villasante. The supplier can respond, sorting information on the spreadsheet and otherwise manipulating data normally.

Going back the other way, data entered on an Excel sheet can be programmed to automatically fill the various boxes of an order or invoice, which goes back through the hub and dumps its data into the appropriate boxes on the large company's back-office software, whatever it's maker. "For the [larger company] to really perceive value, they'd want to connect with the small counterparts as fast as possible," says Villasante. "It allows them to really scale that up."