The Development of Multiperspective of Business to Business E-commerce Maturity Application

The majority firms worldwide are Small Medium Enterprise (SMEs), and they play a significant role in
economy. It is known that SMEs are the main players in generating domestic-led investment and
stimulate economic expansion. They are vital for economic growth and innovation, poverty reduction,
local employment and development, and social cohesion. However, in the current digitally-connected
trading economy, SMEs have face many new challenges that change the way SMEs business-tobusiness
(B2B) trading operates. Among these challenges are the level of B2B e-commerce
implementation and utilization that able to facilitate B2B trading process. However, the implementation
of B2B e-commerce is being categorized as a system with high degree of difficulty since it involves
complexity of the multiple relationships and interactions between trading partners. The interactions
are not just complicated by their volume and variation in processes, but also by the complexity
inherent in the dependencies exist between different trading parties. Based on this, for SMEs to
partake in the B2B e-commerce activities, they need to have attained some reasonable level of
maturity or readiness measurement in order to participate in B2B e-commerce initiatives. To
overcome this, the robust multiperspective B2B e-commerce maturity application to assess the ereadiness
level is needed. This paper describes the development of B2B e-Commerce Maturity
Application (BeMA) which involves several distinct sequential exploratory stages. In order to ensure
its validity and practicality, the application was evaluated by 35 selected SMEs. Based on the
evaluation results, all respondents were agreed on the model usefulness and its practicality. The
research believes that the model will provide practical guidance for SMEs to clearly define appropriate
method of measuring e-readiness and the recommendation approaches to improve their B2B ecommerce
maturity level. The research proved that the theory and findings have thus supported the
B2B e-commerce maturity model. With the adoption of the proposed B2B e-commerce maturity
model, SME is hoped to be better prepared to manage B2B business transaction in a more efficient
way.