A trust modelling analysis for decreasing B2B monitoring costs in supply chain and electronic contracting settings

Abstract

This research is proposed to examine the factor requirement for creating trust model to decrease costs in term of B2B supply chain and electronic contracting setting. Business to Business (B2B) is the electronic transactions between businesses over the internet. The business information propagated via B2B is cheaper and faster than traditional marketing such as advertisement and exhibitions and therefore is transmitted through the internet from local to global, from one place to another place and from business to business. However, business needs to monitor all of its products, services, customer, employee and suppliers for developing and improving its business framework to reach long-term profit. Consequently, there are high costs from products and services such as time, effort and customer’s knowledge. Trust is important, because it decreases transaction costs between businesses. If trust of transactions is high, they will use less time for monitoring costs. This thesis focuses on the perception of customers and employee and verified research hypotheses. The conceptual framework composes of factor that related to customer attitude, employee attitude, trust and monitoring cost. These factors will be undertaken by means of a survey of selected companies. The result of this study is essential to prove research hypotheses. This survey was conducted within coffee chain, superstore, network provider and hotel in Thailand. In total, 50 questionnaires were sent to customers and 40 questionnaires were sent to employees. The questionnaires were sent as an attachment with electronic mail. The results of this survey can be concluded that the method to decrease monitoring costs come from both customers and employees which include how long employees resolve customer problem as soon as possible, how employees decrease costs in their organisation and how they cut their marketing expenditure such as prevent unauthorised document, remove unauthorised document, monitor quality of products and keep records business transaction.