Most business-to-business (B2B) buyers will change suppliers for a better digital experience thanks to the accelerated e-commerce and digital transformation landscape over the past year, according to a survey of U.S. buyers, released this week.
The information comes from the fourth annual B2B commerce report from digital marketing company Avionos, titled “No More Excuses: The Time for B2B Digital Transformation is Now.” The firm surveyed more than 150 B2B buyers at manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and financial services firms to better understand how the pandemic has accelerated B2B organizations’ digital transformation and raised buyer expectations for e-commerce experiences.
The study showed that 90% of B2B buyers would turn to a competitor if a supplier's digital channel couldn't keep up with their needs, up from 88% in 2020. It also showed that buyers’ own digital transformations in their personal lives over the course of the pandemic heightened their expectations for B2B digital experiences: Almost all (96%) buyers have made a purchase for their company online since March 2020, and 63% said they plan to make more than half of their purchases online in 2021, according to the report.
Remote work and the digitization of the procurement process has helped push the trend in 2021, leaving B2B suppliers with a renewed mandate to improve the online buying experience.
“What we’re seeing now is an acceleration in the B2B space that has pushed five years of innovation into one,” Scott Webb, CEO of Avionos, said in a statement announcing the survey results. “Before the pandemic, many B2B buyers were only making purchases from their cubicles or working directly with salespeople to make large-scale purchases, but with the onset of remote work they’ve had no choice but to change the way they buy, further embracing e-commerce. Buyers are now accessing commerce sites on their own time through laptops and mobile devices, increasing the likelihood of making purchases anywhere, at any time. In turn, organizations have further digitized internal processes like invoicing and removed tedious procurement processes. Ultimately, this evolution in buying has made it even more noticeable when there is friction in the buying process, making it that much more important for suppliers to continue to innovate and improve their experiences.”
Other findings include:
B2B buyers said they will pay a premium for great e-commerce experiences: 87% of buyers said they would pay more for a supplier with an excellent e-commerce portal, up from 81% in 2020 and 74% in 2019.
Finding up-to-date product information is increasingly challenging: 48% of buyers said finding up-to-date product or service information was a top challenge when researching purchases, up from 19% in 2020.
B2B suppliers’ technology doesn’t always integrate well with buyers’ technology: 42% of buyers said difficulty integrating suppliers’ tech solutions with their own solutions was a top pain point with supplier technology.
B2B companies should embrace ongoing change: 68% of buyers strongly agree that B2B companies must become more comfortable with change to thrive in the post-pandemic era.
The New Hampshire-based cargo terminal orchestration technology vendor Lynxis LLC today said it has acquired Tedivo LLC, a provider of software to visualize and streamline vessel operations at marine terminals.
According to Lynxis, the deal strengthens its digitalization offerings for the global maritime industry, empowering shipping lines and terminal operators to drastically reduce vessel departure delays, mis-stowed containers and unsafe stowage conditions aboard cargo ships.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
More specifically, the move will enable key stakeholders to simplify stowage planning, improve data visualization, and optimize vessel operations to reduce costly delays, Lynxis CEO Larry Cuddy Jr. said in a release.
The Dutch ship building company Concordia Damen has worked with four partner firms to build two specialized vessels that will serve the offshore wind industry by transporting large, and ever growing, wind turbine components, the company said today.
The first ship, Rotra Horizon, launched yesterday at Jiangsu Zhenjiang Shipyard, and its sister ship, Rotra Futura, is expected to be delivered to client Amasus in 2025. The project involved a five-way collaboration between Concordia Damen and Amasus, deugro Danmark, Siemens Gamesa, and DEKC Maritime.
The design of the 550-foot Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon builds on the previous vessels Rotra Mare and Rotra Vente, which were also developed by Concordia Damen, and have been operating since 2016. However, the new vessels are equipped for the latest generation of wind turbine components, which are becoming larger and heavier. They can handle that increased load with a Roll-On/Roll-Off (RO/RO) design, specialized ramps, and three Liebherr cranes, allowing turbine blades to be stowed in three tiers, providing greater flexibility in loading methods and cargo configurations.
“For the Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon, we, along with our partners, have focused extensively on energy savings and an environmentally friendly design,” Concordia Damen Managing Director Chris Kornet said in a release. “The aerodynamic and hydro-optimized hull design, combined with a special low-resistance coating, contributes to lower fuel consumption. Furthermore, the vessels are equipped with an advanced Wärtsilä main engine, which consumes 15 percent less fuel and has a smaller CO₂ emission footprint than current standards.”
Specifically, loaded import volume rose 11.2% in October 2024, compared to October 2023, as port operators processed 81,498 TEUs (twenty-foot containers), versus 73,281 TEUs in 2023, the port said today.
“Overall, the Port’s loaded import cargo is trending towards its pre-pandemic level,” Port of Oakland Maritime Director Bryan Brandes said in a release. “This steady increase in import volume in 2024 is an encouraging trend. We are also seeing a rise in US agricultural exports through Oakland. Thanks to refrigerated warehousing on Port property near the maritime terminals and convenient truck and rail access, we are well-positioned to continue to grow ag export cargo volume through the Oakland Seaport.”
Looking deeper into its October statistics, loaded exports declined 3.4%, registering 66,649 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 68,974 TEUs in October 2023. Despite that slight decline, the category has grown 6.7% between January and October 2024 compared to the same period last year.
In fact, Oakland’s exports have been declining over the past decade, a long-term trend that is largely due to the reduction in demand for recycled paper exports. However, agricultural exports have made up for some of the export losses from paper, the port said.
For the fourth quarter, empty exports bumped up 30.6%. Port operators processed 29,750 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 22,775 TEUs in October 2023. And empty imports increased 15.3%, with 15,682 TEUs transiting Port facilities in October 2024, in contrast to 13,597 TEUs in October 2023.
A growing number of organizations are identifying ways to use GenAI to streamline their operations and accelerate innovation, using that new automation and efficiency to cut costs, carry out tasks faster and more accurately, and foster the creation of new products and services for additional revenue streams. That was the conclusion from ISG’s “2024 ISG Provider Lens global Generative AI Services” report.
The most rapid development of enterprise GenAI projects today is happening on text-based applications, primarily due to relatively simple interfaces, rapid ROI, and broad usefulness. Companies have been especially aggressive in implementing chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), which can provide personalized assistance, customer support, and automated communication on a massive scale, ISG said.
However, most organizations have yet to tap GenAI’s potential for applications based on images, audio, video and data, the report says. Multimodal GenAI is still evolving toward mainstream adoption, but use cases are rapidly emerging, and with ongoing advances in neural networks and deep learning, they are expected to become highly integrated and sophisticated soon.
Future GenAI projects will also be more customized, as the sector sees a major shift from fine-tuning of LLMs to smaller models that serve specific industries, such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, ISG says. Enterprises and service providers increasingly recognize that customized, domain-specific AI models offer significant advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and performance. Customized GenAI can also deliver on demands like the need for privacy and security, specialization of tasks, and integration of AI into existing operations.
The Port of Oakland has been awarded $50 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) to modernize wharves and terminal infrastructure at its Outer Harbor facility, the port said today.
Those upgrades would enable the Outer Harbor to accommodate Ultra Large Container Vessels (ULCVs), which are now a regular part of the shipping fleet calling on West Coast ports. Each of these ships has a handling capacity of up to 24,000 TEUs (20-foot containers) but are currently restricted at portions of Oakland’s Outer Harbor by aging wharves which were originally designed for smaller ships.
According to the port, those changes will let it handle newer, larger vessels, which are more efficient, cost effective, and environmentally cleaner to operate than older ships. Specific investments for the project will include: wharf strengthening, structural repairs, replacing container crane rails, adding support piles, strengthening support beams, and replacing electrical bus bar system to accommodate larger ship-to-shore cranes.