14.5. Concluding Remarks

Web-based systems allow suppliers to tap directly into manufacturing and order systems databases in real time. By giving suppliers access to product sales forecasts, manufacturers allow suppliers to adjust their production schedules to guarantee timely delivery of supplies while maintaining inventory levels as low as possible. B2B provides a wealth of opportunities for optimization, cost reduction, better quality of service, customization, and dynamic pricing

This chapter illustrated, through an example, how B2C interactions affect B2B interactions. The link between customers, manufacturers, and suppliers is the information flow that propagates almost seamlessly, facilitated through the Web. An important lesson of this chapter is that business plans can and should be translated into transaction processing requirements. In other words, one can translate revenue throughput to transactions per second and use performance models to size the capacity of e-business sites. B2C transactions may generate one or more B2B transactions, which need to be taken into account by the performance models.