Trade Ranger (TR) President & CEO John Wilson has written to members at large in what amounts to a position paper on upstream e-business. Wilson recognizes that these are challenging times for our industry and that ‘high profits from upstream activity have not been rewarded through stock price performance’. Such uncertainty is ‘driving a case for greater productivity and bottom-line results, even under the worst possible financial conditions’.
Unprecedented
For Wilson though, today’s situation represents ‘an unprecedented opportunity for e-business to realize real efficiencies through process cost reductions, and leveraging information and knowledge captured by electronic commerce. TR itself is transforming – notably with a shift in focus from technology to service. TR ‘consistently delivers over 98% percent uptime’ and is ‘constantly seeking to integrate new documents and capabilities’ into its solution.
Global presence
TR is expanding its business to serve its global membership – with the opening of a new European office in Brussels. Other centers are planned. TR is also changing its corporate culture. The organization used to be staffed by ‘consultants and secondees’. These are to be replaced with ‘full-time incentivized employees’. Wilson intends to complete TR’s transformation with an increased customer focus. TR plans to ‘participate in the internal business, political, hierarchical and social networks of our members’ and thereby to ‘better assist them in the adoption of effective e-procurement strategies’. TR’s vertical markets are searching for innovative, yet inexpensive, ways to improve business performance. TR expects to see ‘increased demand for access to our exchange’ though the ‘community effect’ which lowers the cost to TR members well below that of an individual private exchange. Finally, TR helps organizations ‘adopt standards that offer real value and benefit to everyone in the community’.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2003 Issue # 5.
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