Saleh,

B2B application is quite general term. Each system used by company who cooperates with other organizations is such application.

On the other hand, there are several classes of IT systems that help to run business - ERP, MRP, CRM, WMS, SCM... etc.

Therefore, I would say that SCM-class systems are B2B applications.

Thanks Tomasz for your answer.

Agreed. B2B application support inter-enterprise processes, hence, processes that go across one or several legal entities. SCM processes and the underlying systems are one example. But there are financial processes with B2B applications (integration with bank), sales processes, R&D processes, etc. that require also B2B systems to support them effectively.

Thanks Mathias for your input.

Agree with both Tomascz and Mathias. Not sure I would concur with Frans. Why must SCM necessarily involve more than two business entities? It is conceivable that a firm is interested in only managing the link between itself and Tier 1 supplier or there are no further links in the chain (i.e., a single Tier). An SCM system is one kind of B2B system.

Frans, I liked the idea of considering the B2B is a SCM application, not the other way. It looks reasonable and interesting. Thanks for your contribution.

Ram, your point is also valid. However, Frans' one is also valid in my opinion. Thank you for your answer.

You're welcome, Saleh. Just to elaborate a bit: I think adjacency has nothing t do with whether B2B or not. Pairwise relationship between enterprises in a chain, whether adjacent or not, are all B2B relationships. So a firm's relationship between itself and a Tier 1 or a Tier 3 supplier are individually B2B relationships. So also is a relationship between a Tier 1 and a Tier 2 supplier. In SCM, the firm coordinates and controls these relationships. But they are, in the end, a set of B2B relationships. This apart, there is the issue of the special case of a firm and its Single Tier of suppliers (i.e., assume there are no multiple tiers or that the firm has no interest in managing the additional tiers). Then, we have a set of B2B relationships between the firm and its Tier1 suppliers. Yet, the firm is managing its supply "chain."

In my view, B2B is a broader description than SCM. Let me elaborate. "B2B" means essentially that it has to do with interactions between business entities rather than between consumers, households or any other type of non-business entity in an economic system. Such industrial systems are common in our economies. However they are not independent of end-consumers as many marketing texts will show. But within these systems, marketing and purchasing activities usually take special form thus motivating the term "B2B". Examples include strategic alliances, marketing channels, business relationships and cooperative arrangements in product development and technological development and innovation.

Now, "SCM" as in 'Supply Chain Management' is, in my view, a special case of B2B interactions focusing on managing the flows of supply in a chain of businesses or to a business unit. It entails a conscious supply-perspective and a focus on the inbound flows. Of course what is inbound from one vantage point is outbound from the other just as there is never a buyer without a seller. Thus, SCM indirectly embrace more than just the inbound flow of resources and accommodates also other aspects of flows of goods, information, knowledge and money in the industrial chains that eventually supply consumer markets with goods readily available for consumption. But the primary focus is on the supply flows in the value chains, hence the label SCM. However, these chains can and have been called other things in the literature, when viewed from other vantage points. For example, Wroe Alderson calls them "transvections" (Alderson, 1957) and McInnes calls them "marketing systems" and describes them as systems that connects production functions of an economy with consumption (McInnes, 1964). A later development is Bagozzi's "exchange systems" (Bagozzi, 1974).

Regardless of the label, when seen as a total, these entities provide end-consumers with all the goods we see today and SCM is a label used to denote the issues and challenges associated with managing the flows of resources among the actors involved in performing various activities necessary to transform natural resources to end-products, or as Alderson would express it: to turn meaningless heterogeneity to meaningful heterogeneity (Alderson, 1957).

Now, such analyses can be done by focusing on dyadic interactions, that is interactions between two parties as in buyer-seller relationships of by focusing on multilateral interactions among multiple actors. Multilateral interactions can be of two principal types: chain or network. A chain is characterized by each entity having connections that are isolated upstream and downstream in the value chain. This mean that the connection downstream is connected to entities upstream only via the focal entity in question. There is no "short-circuiting". A network, on the other hand is conceptually defined as a set of interconnected links (drawing on social exchange theory [Emerson, 1962 ; Homans, 1958; Blau, 1964]). This means that one business relationship is linked to another and that what happens in one relationship affects - 'taints' - other relationships in both a positive and negative manner.

Hence, I would suggest the term "Supply Network Management - SNM" to label issues and problems relating to the supply flows of inter-connected networks of business relationships (Håkansson & Persson, 2004; Hulthén & Gadde, 2007; Huemer, 2012) as a complement to the already well-estabished term SCM. However, both deal with B2B issues and only indirectly with issues pertaining to end-consumers. This is perhaps a shortcoming that needs to be rectified by future research?

(Apologies for a lengthy comment).

References used:

Alderson, Wroe. (1957). Marketing Behavior and Executive Action: A Functionalist Approach to Marketing Theory. Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin.

Bagozzi, Richard P. (1974). Marketing as an Organized Behavioral System of Exchange. Journal of Marketing, 38(October), 77-81.

Blau, Peter M. (1964). Exchange and Power in Social Life. Chicago, Ill.: John Wiley & Sons.

Emerson, Robert M. (1962). Power-Dependence Relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31-41.

Håkansson, Håkan, & Persson, Gøran. (2004). Supply Chain Management: The Logic of Supply Chains and Networks. International Journal of Logistics Management, 15(1), 11-26.

Homans, George. (1958). Social Behavior as Exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 63, 597-606.

Huemer, Lars. (2012). Unchained from the chain: Supply management from a logistics service provider perspective. Journal of Business Research, 65(2), 258-264.

Hulthén, Kajsa, & Gadde, Lars-Erik. (2007). Understanding the 'new' distribution reality through 'old' concepts: A renaissance for transvection and sorting. Marketing Theory, 7(2), 184-207.

McInnes, W. (1964). A Conceptual Approach to Marketing. In R. Cox, W. Alderson & S. J. Shapiro (Eds.), Theory in Marketing. Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin.

As mentioned in the other answers SCM applications are normally part of B2B. However, a supply chain could also be a part of B2C. From procurement to internal production processes and fulfillment to cover needs of consumers. Normally SCM applications are being used for mission critical direct goods (or services) and not so often for MRO goods (or services).

I will add that SCM main goals are related to traceability while B2B denotes a type of transactions. The differences could be clear by changing the perspective.

Just a quick point and bit of history. The mirror image (in my view) of SCM is CRM - customer relationship management. When these terms started to come into prominence I was still an IBM employee (Executive Consultant in business architecture). I argued that IBM could co-opt the whole issue through integrated enterprise applications that recognized the mirror image of buying and selling. My proposals fell on deaf ears, and IBM followed the industry into bifurcation, where whole companies grew up on either side of the issue, and IBM created separate, enormous organizations on either side. Oh well.

Thanks, Mcdavid for sharing your experience at IBM.

I completely agree SCM and CRM are mirror images of each other. B2B applications are part of a bigger picture that is SCM/CRM.

Can we imagine SCM or CRM without B2B transactions and associated interfaces therein?

HI S.G. -- No, I can't imagine that, and by that statement I include the day before computers when the interface was paper and quills! (Slightly before my time ... at least the quills part!)

Definitely B2B is bigger applications as a whole as compared to SCM. B2B is completely a business plan and implementations by companies ensuring of their business expansions plan as top management priority. SCM is considered as the effective instrument and tools to ensure what being planned for B2B is achievable. But as the current global business trends now is moving and mostly likely to spin fast,or faster, resulting to many competitiveness of business volatile success or failures, SCM stood and fit in firmly into the actions. As proven by the linkages in every company practicing SCM, we found the enourmous applications to meet the figures of the output or the shipments in the name of B2B KPI.