B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Software Agents 395
such as a thesaurus service. With more efficient and powerful search
capabilities, agents will help drive down e-commerce costs and make
B2B e-commerce more transparent.
13.9.2. Uncovering quality sales prospects
Agents can automate the process of identifying quality sales leads for
the sales and marketing professionals. They can search, retrieve, analyze,
identify, generate precise targeted sales prospects and interact with
users to develop an accurate data profile of a quality prospect in the
target market segment.
For example, ProspectMiner, a seller agent developed by Inkarta,
generates buyer profiles by pulling information in parallel from 19 search
and directory services. For each quality lead identified, ProspectMiner
automatically researches the candidate company, retrieving and organizing
the key information needed by sales and marketing professionals to
initiate an informed contact. ProspectMiner can be set into auto-query
mode to operate autonomously on the user's behalf, periodically scanning
the Web for new prospects and information about previously identified
and researched prospects in the given market segment.
Advantages of Web-based lead generation include the ability to
access far more companies than are available through any other lead
source — finding the smallest, newest and least known prospects — and
to retrieve the most current information about each quality candidate.
13.9.3. Value chain integration
An integrated supply chain allows businesses to share real-time
information and drastically reduce transaction costs. Agents act as value
chain integrators by automating and integrating the value chain. The
value chain is comprised of inbound logistics, operations, outbound
logistics, marketing and sales and service.
Using agents that communicate and collaborate within the organization
and with the trading partners, companies can reduce cycle times and
increase transparency throughout the procurement and supply chain.