Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

Developing Internet Partnerships 271
leader. Grainger is a $5 billion b-to-b distributor with a 220,000-item
online catalog. Sales processed through the company’s Internet businesses
were $100 million for the first quarter of 2001, up more than
60% from the $62 million achieved in the first quarter of 2000.
Grainger’s Internet businesses include Grainger.com, LabSafety.com,
and FindMRO.com.
Grainger has been an innovator in Internet partnering, as demonstrated
by FindMRO.com. Created in 1999, FindMRO.com now has
relationships with more than 14,000 industrial suppliers and, as a result,
offers access to 100,000 brands and over 5 million products.
FindMRO.com offers product search and sourcing, supplier management,
and order processing and fulfillment.
Grainger further extended its Web partnering activity in 1999 with
the launch of OrderZone. OrderZone targeted small and medium-sized
industrial companies with a Web site that consolidated more than
400,000 items, from office supplies to cleaning products to laboratory
safety equipment. OrderZone featured consolidated buying across six
companies’ product lines with a single point of registration, a single
purchase order, and a single invoice.
In June 2000 OrderZone was merged with a small business purchasing
site, Works.com (www.works.com). Grainger took a 40% stake
in Works.com, but the focus of the site changed in 2001 as hard times
hit dot-coms. Now Works.com is a provider of procurement solutions
for midsize businesses instead of a purchasing site.
Perhaps the best forerunner of future Internet partnering, however,
is the business exchange model, discussed in Chapter 8. Exchanges such
as Covisint, a consortium of automotive manufacturers, Converge and
e2open, each founded by groups of competitive IT companies, and
Orbitz, a travel site founded by five major airlines, are leading examples
of this unique Internet collaboration. Although some exchanges, such
as Covisint, are designed to improve business processes and centralize
purchasing for an industry, others, such as Orbitz, are looking for a
way to gain market share for the participating companies by working
together. These types of exchanges could just as easily have been included
in this chapter because they, too, are primary examples of Internet
partnerships at work.
You can expect to see many more of these partnerships, strategic
alliances, and affiliations spring up, all facilitated by the Internet. It is
too large a business opportunity to ignore, even for companies who
compete with one another.