|
Hard and Fast
Canada’s Concrete Industry Techs Up
By Peter Clifford
Canada’s concrete industry is undergoing a digital makeover in which a keyboard and Internet hook-up could soon rival the telephone as the communications sales tool of choice.
Leading the charge for change on the ready-mix supplier side is Dufferin Concrete, which introduced an online service in January it says delivers a blend of commerce, content and collaboration.
The site was designed and built by iSTARK Inc., a Toronto enterprise Web portal developer that specializes in the cement and concrete industries. The company says its sites, which include the St. Lawrence Cement e-business portal launched in 2001, resulted in 1.3 million tons of building material orders being placed electronically last year by 6,000 registered users.
Earlier this year, Holcim U.S., which like Dufferin Concrete and St. Lawrence Cement is part of the Holcim SA empire headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, launched Cement-Online, which it hailed as the industry’s first complete e-business portal for its North American customers. Up until now, the company said, the construction industry has been slow to adopt Web-based technologies. The new offering has a key feature currently missing in the Dufferin Concrete portal – the ability to order online. Registered users now have access to invoices, account statements and electronic bills of lading. There’s also the capability to repeat an order via a one-click express feature.
Each user also receives a secure e-mail box, which allows them to communicate with other platform users and all order activity can be tracked for up to six months. The goal is to streamline the ordering process and speed up delivery time.
“In today’s information age, technology has made it faster and easier for companies to communicate and conduct business,” says Bill Townsend, the company’s deputy CEO. “The feedback from customers has been positive and somewhat overwhelming.”
Dave Codack, president and CEO of iSTARK, says customers are looking for speed, convenience and relevance from a portal.
“The number one advantage you hear is that they can rectify their accounts very quickly,” he says. “There are definitely savings in the facilitation of an order and in dispute resolution.
“When this whole thing around the Internet hype was starting to come to the fore in the late ‘90s, there was a real concern on behalf of the cement manufacturers that if they didn’t get in this game they would be at risk from competitors who would be putting up reverse auctions, for example, which they couldn’t compete with.”
Reverse Auctions: Good Riddance?
Fortunately for the industry, reverse auctions appear to have flopped. Ralph Rio, a director with the research firm ARC Advisory Group in Lowell, Mass., says that e-business portals that avoid auctions and concentrate on aggregating the buying and selling requirements of suppliers and customers will succeed.
Scott Ringler, iSTARK’s director of marketing, says that an online service has been a driver for process changes within organizations who do business with any of the three companies.
Louis Morissette, general manager of Dufferin Concrete, says that while the order-taking capability on the portal is still at least 12 months away, the response from customers has been positive.
Features include customized account and product information, access to customers, detailed weather reports to help users determine orders and delivery schedules and online technical and training tools.
“In the short term, we expect the entire administration process will be smoother and more seamless,” says Morissette. “In the longer term, it will be used to introduce new products and services to the customer base.
“They want to see new ways to do business, they want to see them grow, be efficient and they want to take advantage of technology,” he says. “We realized that digitizing the relationship with the customer was going to become an expectation.”
The company was also intrigued by how quickly St. Lawrence Cement customers gravitated to the portal.
Dufferin Concrete’s customer base consists of large commercial contractors who are sophisticated and utilize the Internet for B2B transactions, other contractors who see the need to use technology in order to compete, and many family businesses, some of whom use the Internet to purchase materials and source information.
“Others are more traditional and struggle with the computer, but that is changing quickly,” says Morissette.
Peter Clifford is a Toronto-based freelance writer specializing in business and technology topics.
|
