E-business revisited: even before getting an essential common language, the industry is using the eb to fundamentally change - E-concrete - Brief Article

Concrete Producer, The, July, 2002 by Don Talend

More than one media figure has noted that society hasn't labeled the 1990s as it has others, e.g., "the '80s Decade of Greed" and "the '70s Me Generation." (And what the heck would you call our current decade? Someone suggested "the Zips.") I think, though, that when we reminisce about the '90s, we'll recall Y2K paranoia and "dot-bombs," meaning that we could make a case for nicknaming the '90s "the Information Decade," albeit one that had a few missteps.

E-business is here to stay, even though nobody has made any money on it yet. Now everyone's older and wiser since the dot-bombs proved that technology is only a means to a strategic end.

Ours has had the same e-business experiences as any other industry. In the late '90s, dot-com startups received tons of cash from venture capitalists and spent much of it on costly brand building. The idea was that concrete producers would order their materials and take concrete orders through whichever intermediary site emerged as the e-Bay of the industry. Hey, hindsight is always 20/20; I once thought that Steve Forbes actually had a shot at the White House.

Even at the peak of dot-com fever, NRMCA and PCA began working on establishing Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards for secure data sharing within the industry, expanding the industry's e-business initiatives beyond e-commerce. Without getting into a technical dissertation, suffice it to say that XML is a programming language that makes it easier for computers to share data without human intervention.

While Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) provides colorful and (theoretically) user-friendly Web pages, XML allows the user to define data fields within a database and easily obtain data. Members of every company or industry who want to share data across a network using XML must agree to a common language for that purpose. To this end, software developers are offering Web services that include pre-written XML code packages that reduce much of the time required for programming.

Last January, management consulting firm KPMG completed a study on common XML standards for the concrete and cement industries. In a "white paper," it is recommended that NRMCA and PCA move ahead with standards development by forming working teams to design common standards for the various transactions that occur along the supply chain. It is also recommended that the teams create a base specification and a first iteration of standards, and the whole process should be finished in 9 months from start to completion.

Wally Johnson, vice president of sales at Darien, Ill.-based Systech Inc. and chair of the NRMCA IT Committee, stresses the importance of this effort. Currently, he explains, producers may use different software for batching controls, dispatching, and accounting, each of which uses different standards for data sharing. They must have links written for each program. "Of course, it's become quite labor-intensive and expensive for both the software companies and for producers," he says. "We're that a universal link should be written into XML standards."

Developing common standards is crucial because industries that produce alternative building materials, such as steel and plastic, are doing it. More importantly, Web-enabled customer relationship management (CRM) is already emerging in our industry without common standards.

By definition, CRM means combining customer-relevant data and presenting a single interface to the customer for better service. At ConExpoCon/Agg in Las Vegas this past March, Ken Gendrich, director of product research for CommandAlkon, told me that XML is affecting CRM in our industry in two key areas: order management/accounting and in terms of optimizing delivery schedules and mix designs.

Gendrich notes that Web-enabled CRM can mean automatic capture of delivery-ticket information for the producer and greater access to account information for the customer. From the customer's standpoint, he compares Web-enabled CRM to the impact of technology on banking.

"It's almost like what the automated teller machine [ATM] did for personal banking," he says. "You can check your status and you can make transactions at that ATM." For example, a contractor can see if all of the orders requested for the following day have been entered or canceled as needed. For the producer, Web-enabled CRM can mean that data captured from an electronic ticketing device don't require re-entry into the accounts receivable system, improving accuracy while decreasing effort.

The next frontier in Web-enabled CRM--optimization--is truly revolutionary. I'll explain this concept in more detail in a future column, but there are dispatching and concrete quality-control aspects to it. First, Gendrich envisions software that would perform hundreds of calculations at any given point in time to recommend which truck or plant to use for an order, minimizing delivery time and cost and providing customers with a consistent level of service. Second, several firms are looking at joining forces to have concrete technologists design optimized mixes for customers and store them in a database.