Recently there have been lots of news and activities about business-to-business (B2B) within the flooring industry. This includes the newly formed Floor Covering Business-to-Business Association (FCB2B) by industry participants (FCNews, Sept. 4/11), adoptions by more manufacturers and distributors and so forth.

With all this taking place, what does it have to do with you, the specialty floor covering retailer? The following are answers to some of the frequent questions we get about B2B and the industry's initiative to conduct business via this method.

What is flooring B2B, again?

Flooring B2B refers to a set of standardized computer communication protocol that is implemented to exchange business transactions between vendors' and retailers' computer systems.

What is the flooring B2B standard intended to do?

While there are many elements, the two main areas it is aimed at are: 1) Avoid errors and mistakes often associated with manual processes such as using the phone or fax machine, and 2) Make product inquiries and purchasing more efficient, similar to how you manage your online banking and buy holiday gifts on sites like Amazon.com, so you can compare prices, check availability, etc., over the Web or through B2B software.

How does it benefit the retailer?

Flooring retailers can take advantage of the B2B system in the following ways: 1) Get up-to-date prices and material specifications automatically. Now you and sales reps no longer have to wait for vendor representatives to call you back. You have access to this important information at your convenience; from your office, home or even customer sites. 2) Easily compare vendor products and streamline your purchasing process. By leveraging easily accessed product specs among vendors, you can make better purchase decisions for both customers and your inventory planning. The B2B functions make tracking and managing purchase order status, vendor inventory availability and shipping status changes as easily as checking your e-mail. 3) The ultimate result is the economical savings you and your business will realize using B2B.

How does a retailer get started with B2B, and what is the cost?

As the first step, you have to set up a B2B account with your vendors who offer B2B services. You may contact your vendor representatives to get the setup information. Of course, the setup and services are free because it saves vendors cost in processing your phone calls.

Secondly, you can choose one of three types of B2B systems: 1) Log on to a vendor's B2B Web site to access to your product catalogs. The cost is zero. However, as dealers have multiple vendors, it is hard to compare and track all vendors' products and purchase orders at different Web accounts, and it is hard to link products and orders at vendors' sites back to your own management systems for your own accounting and inventory. 2) Use B2B functions of specialized financial management software systems. Comp-U-Floors, QFloors, Pacific Solutions, RFMS and a few others offer B2B functionality within their business management systems. So a dealer can manage multiple vendors' catalogs and purchase orders within one integrated system. This is a clear advantage over the just mentioned approach. However, you need to own one of the systems to be able to take that advantage, and 3) Use Web-based flooring B2B services. This approach has the advantages of the first two approaches, i.e., easy-to-deploy Web access and integrates all vendor catalogs and purchase orders, and without the cost of owning a financial management software system. So far, Floor-Link.net B2B is the only Web-based B2B service that can integrate all B2B enabled vendor catalogs into one login account. The cost of FloorLink.net is a monthly subscription fee.