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"For a refresher, I chose the company of ULTA beauty for week one's discussion. ULTA Beauty is the biggest beauty retailer in the United States. They sell cosmetics, fragrance, skin care, hair care, and salon services.
Business to business enterprises concentrate on marketing their services and goods to other companies to maintain the smooth operation of their own company. Currently ULTA employees a B2B model because they buy goods directly from suppliers at discount rates. ULTA then sells the products to its consumers at full retail pricing. An area for future growth or opportunity to expand this B2B would break into wholesale salon products. Currently, ULTA offers salon services to customers, although they have limited bulk selection to offer to business operating salons. Therefore, I think a great B2B opportunity would be to sell wholesale products to salons. This would entail ULTA purchasing the larger bulk items and then selling them to small local salons for retail pricing. Information that would be shared between the two companies would be consumer shipping information, type of product, and possibly payment information.
For B2B systems, frequently the business' systems connect directly to the systems of another business entity. If this new B2B interaction was put into place, it would ULTA purchasing the larger bulk items and then selling them to small local salons for retail pricing every day. Therefore, the frequency of the interactions with the B2B system would need to be daily.
After much research into computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM), supply chain management (SCM) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and other internal systems, I decided to implement a supply chain management system. SCM systems are used by businesses with many suppliers and products. Currently, ULTA has over 25,000 beauty products from 500 suppliers. Since this move would be adding more products, I think a SCM system is needed. Additionally, ULTA currently uses a SCM system and recently invested 119 million dollars in updating it. What they currently are doing is working so I would stick to their evidence-based practice! Having a SCM system connected to your eBusiness system would be imperative for many reasons. It would help manage the acquisition of product to the delivery at its intended location in addition to aiding in the management of the flow of commodities, data, and money associated to a good or service.
I believe that this B2B opportunity does align with our generic strategy of cost leadership. This move would broaden their market even more and add even more product to their inventory! It would also give ULTA an advantage over competitors."