Research - "The Impact of E-Commerce on Facility Management Practices"
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The Internet and business-to-business e-commerce have grown much more rapidly than anyone guessed even five years ago, spawning potentially new ways of communication, collaboration and coordination among consumers, businesses and trading partners. However, there are many different opinions about the importance of e-commerce in facility management. The goal of this project was to develop factual information about how e-commerce is being used, who is using it, and how they expect it will be used in the future. We would like to acknowledge the support of the IFMA Foundation Corporate Circle of Contributors, without whose financial support this project would not have been possible.

Key Findings

1. How is e-commerce being used today?
   E-commerce is just beginning to emerge as a tool that is used to help manage facilities. The most frequent application of e-commerce today is to purchase supplies and materials on the web from a specific vendor. Almost 2 out of 10 respondents indicated that their department purchases supplies and materials on the web "a lot." In addition to purchasing supplies and materials, the other top uses of e-commerce were accessing facilities manuals, publishing static project information on the Internet, purchasing supplies and materials through an Internet service that connects buyers and sellers, and taking interactive courses via the Internet.
2. How will e-commerce be used in the next two years?
   Respondents have clear expectations that e-commerce in facility management will grow substantially over the next two years and that it will significantly affect facility management practices. Respondents anticipated that e-commerce use will substantially expand in every application category over the next two years. In addition, almost 1/4 said that they expected business-to-business e-commerce to change their facility management department "a lot" over the same time period. Only 2% said that they did not expect their department to change at all because of e-commerce.
3. Who is using e-commerce?
   There is substantial variability regarding the use of e-commerce among various industry groups. Telecommunications (Service providers) and Information (Data processing and services) industry groups tended to be relatively heavy users of e-commerce. Vehicles and Investment (All securities and investment services) groups reported relatively low use activity. Additional analysis suggests that those companies who are ISO 9000 certified also may be more likely to adopt e-commerce.
4. How effective is the use of business-to-business e-commerce?
   Respondents felt that e-commerce has not resulted in a major improvement in their ability to more effectively manage cost or time issues. However, they expect this to change in the next two years. The "payoff" for investing in e-commerce has not yet been clearly demonstrated. Some agree or strongly agree that e-commerce has helped decrease the time to complete projects (55%) or that e-commerce has decreased the cost of purchasing supplies and materials (67%). However, a majority disagree or strongly disagree that e-commerce has decreased the cost of facility maintenance and operations (51%), decreased the total annual cost of facilities (53%), decreased the cost of new construction projects (71%), or decreased the cost of space management (70%). These opinions change substantially when the next two years are considered, with a majority agreeing or strongly agreeing that e-commerce will help decrease both time and cost for all categories.
5. What are the barriers to implementing e-commerce?
   Overall, 11% felt that implementing e-commerce was a big problem and one-half said that implementing e-commerce was somewhat of a problem. Twelve percent felt that implementing business-to-business e-commerce solutions was not a problem. The biggest specific problem in implementing e-commerce was reported to be the difficulty in integrating with legacy systems. Other top problems included lack of a budget to invest in e-commerce, hard to customize software packages, cost of software upgrades, and cost of keeping building data current.

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