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By Joey Gardiner, 6 August 2001 17:52

NEWS Over half of European operations directors think that company and customer issues are the biggest barriers to 'collaborative ecommerce'. Surprisingly, the majority do not see limitation in IT as the biggest obstacle in rolling out collaborative ecommerce with their suppliers. In a survey sponsored by ERP vendor J.D. Edwards four of the five directors interviewed said that factors other than IT are more likely to hold back B2B plans. In the UK particularly, company issues, such as budgeting or expertise within the business alone are the largest obstacles to these types of schemes. 14 per cent of European respondents said there are no barriers at all. The survey was conducted by interviews with 100 finance, purchasing, logistics and operations directors from across the UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Beth Barling, senior analyst at AMR Research, said the findings are in line with research AMR has done. However, she doubted whether many of the respondents are quite aware of how difficult much of the technology is: "There is a sense in which many companies don't realise how hard these projects are in technology terms until they've done them, because they believe the industry hype. This is how many businesses are disappointed by the delivery of IT." The survey also found that despite the downturn currently affecting the industry, more than two thirds of respondents plan to increase their IT investment to allow them to collaborate with partners.