The Impact of e-Business on Relationships between Customer and Supplier

摘要

This paper examines three relationship typologies to provide a framework for assessing the impact of E-business on the customer-supplier relationship. E-business is well suited to two typologies, Open Market and Collaborative. The concept of "partnership" encapsulated in the Control typology will come under pressure from the use of E-business in Open Market and Collaborative models. Collaboration is a more appropriate term than partnership for small supplier - large customer relationships. Collaborative working enables formation of virtual enterprises, blurring tier level distinctions and creating a whole new set of project oriented collaborative relationships that come into being and later disappear. E-marketplaces offer compelling benefits for both customer and supplier that will be hard to resist. Aspects of each of the three typologies can usually be found a customer-supplier relationship, but the bias towards Control as practiced today will wane in the future.