To B2B or not To B2N.

The E-Marketplace Dilemma

WHEN WAL-MART was busy rebuffing advances from the retail industry's public marketplaces in favor of building its own private network for global suppliers, few companies had even explored the value proposition of e-marketplace collaboration, much less decided whether to go private or public.

Today, while every CEO likely understands the benefits of participating in New Economy electronic markets or trading exchanges, debate continues to rage over the precise path to profitable use of these powerful technologies. Will collaborating with competitors in an open exchange provide more opportunity for them to steal good ideas? Or will it afford the kind of strategic sharing that cuts costs and creates best-of-breed services and products for customers?

The jury, it seems, is still out, according to participants at a roundtable held in partnership with Accenture. And when the dust settles, it may well be that the paths to successful B2B deployment diverge, with no one easy answer. Whichever path a CEO chooses, strategic questions abound. For public marketplaces, there are issues of privacy and security to consider, as well as governance issues and antitrust hurdles. Those who choose private marketplaces, on the other hand, have to worry about whether they're being too insular, and whether they'll miss Out on increased sales by not expanding their universe of buyers and sellers. And just how extensively will companies have to change internally to make room for collaborative commerce?

Perhaps even more challenging for CEOs is figuring our how, at a time when the technology is still in its early stages, to allocate sufficient resources to B2B strategies while responsibly hedging their bets--particularly in a slowing economy. Certainly, the task of sorting out the hype from the benefits is no easy feat--and those sitting on the sidelines may already be too late.

B2B: The Here and Now

Ed Starr (Accenture): We've certainly seen a pretty dramatic change in the markets and it's a little harder to tell some of these stories today than it might have been six or eight months ago when the market was in a different state. Now, I think a number of companies have been pausing, watching what's happening in their industries and trying to figure out the best path forward. Do they participate in some of these existing marketplaces, or are B2B capabilities really about new enablers and new technologies that can support what they've always been doing?

Many of these exchanges started out doing a lot of the simple stuff, helping new buyers and sellers find one another, where applicable, or doing some simple order and procurement type of activity. Now they're trying to figure out the value-added capabilities they ought to build and what the revenue models are going to look like as the services become more complex. There are a lot of questions. One of the positions we've adopted is that these exchanges will be very valuable from a value-creation standpoint and will allow the companies participating in them to generate a lot of value.

But the exchange businesses themselves and the online companies that are formed aren't likely to capture a lot of that value. There's been a lot of struggling with that. If exchanges can't charge a lot for the service, if people aren't going to benefit from the transaction, how do we stay operational for our own good? Another issue is the whole debate about participating in public marketplaces vs. doing this yourself with your own suppliers and customers in what is being called a private marketplace. Companies are looking at public marketplaces as ways of sharing the expense to develop new capability, and they're adopting standards and really advancing best practices.

In some industries, we see companies are concerned about giving up competitive advantage and sharing information with their competitors. Some of the larger companies we've worked with have told us they don't see themselves doing any one thing but rather participating in a number of different types of B2B initiatives.

The good news is the cost to deploy some of these technologies is lower now. You can rent vs. buy in many cases, or subscribe, so there are opportunities for people to experiment before making a big investment.

As far as how to participate and what companies should get involved in, we hear a couple of questions frequently: "How's this going to impact relationships we have with our current customers and our current suppliers, if we start buying or selling through new channels?" and "Is it time for us to embrace this yet?"

There's been a lot of press and excitement about this stuff over the past year or so. We're really just at the very tip of the iceberg from the standpoint of individual companies getting benefits out of these new capabilities and figuring out how to take advantage of them in different areas of their business. And as companies move ahead, it's going to be much less a question of, "What do we do over here with B2B?" and more a question of, "How do we move forward with these technologies and these new channels to do what we've always done--but better?"

John Brandt (CE): I'm curious where people are in terms of participating in some of the B2B marketplaces and other e-marketplaces.

Gary Jamison (UGN): We're doing some of it. For example, our biggest customer is Toyota. Now, all of our invoicing and payments are handled through the Internet. The next step is working out a transmission of engineering data, design data.

Toyota has put suppliers on notice that by March, 2002, all purchase orders will be handled over the Internet, and our choice is either to be prepared or not get a purchase order. So there's some real pressure in our industry to do it, but our customers are being reasonably patient and doing a good job working with us to be sure that we're prepared.

The potential for savings is truly phenomenal. Recently I heard a gentleman from Boston Consulting Group say that MRO purchases on an annual basis are $400 to $500 billion, and that the processing cost of the transactions equals the value of the materials. There's no question in my mind that there's huge, huge savings potential by going through the Internet.

Randy Weghorst (AOC-Resins): Yes, only if you get rid of the people. That's the human reality.

Starr: Or the high road is to get rid of the people doing the transactions and increase the people using all that information, the e-knowledge workers. It does bring about a new set of capabilities you need to really take advantage of. Otherwise people would just have all this info on their hands.

Weghorst: I'm particularly interested in using or looking at these tools to enter new markers.

Jamison: If you survey most companies, the software, the hardware, the systems are there. People have upgraded for whatever reason, but they're not connected. That was our situation. If you imagine the ultimate end point of this thing, one day a consumer will be able to order a vehicle and it'll come through the Internet, through us, to our supplier, to tell them to ship us product, and no human being will ever have to be involved in the process.

Bill Copacino (Accenture): I tend to be less optimistic with the industry consortium. First of all, it's not to say that they're not going to add tremendous value; they're really going to accelerate the development of standards--data standards, detail process standards--and draw a tremendous amount of attention and visibility to this area. But in the end the government processes by design are going to move a little bit more slowly. As technology evolves, the cost difference of joint investments vs. individual investments will really narrow, and what will happen is what happened to me: The industry consortium will create tremendous value by moving the industries fairly rapidly in this direction, but a lot of the transactions in the end may be one-to-one. And then you get to the really strategic processes which haven't come up yet, like the engineering linkages.

Arnie Pollard (CE): Are B2B e-marketplaces going to succeed? When the smoke clears, will there really be a need for them on an ongoing basis, a business model that keeps them alive for somebody like an e-Steel to be at the nexus of the steel industry?

Copacino: I'm a firm believer that individual private exchanges--supply chain collaborations--are going to be very successful and have a big future. There are five or six major steel exchanges today. Clearly, not all of them are going to reach the liquidity levels that they have in the business plans, but some will be successful.

Mike Hudson (Rolls-Royce Corporation): How much of what we're seeing today is just automating the old processes and how much is really a new approach?

Copacino: I think we're seeing a little bit of both. You know, there's value in automating the old processes--it's more efficient, it takes some cost out, etc. You can do more by really tailoring, reinventing, changing the process, and how it occurs. So you're seeing some automating, you're seeing other companies more extensively reinventing, and you're seeing companies taking it further with a combination of mechanisms.

David Glassman (Stern Stewart): I think the culture changes that need to take place are as profound as the potential benefits. That's one reason why things will go slowly. There need to be new governance processes to create collaborations across companies with different cultures, where they're going into it perhaps with different agendas, different performance measures, different incentive systems, etc. To make that work is not a technological limitation, but more of a limitation of governance and process and human behavior.

Shahara Ahmad-Llewellyn (The Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Co.): And then you add the culture, the actual corporate culture on top of the individual culture that exists by department. When you layer on top of that, what you have is everyone having a different opinion.

Debra Richman (Besthalf.com): That's right because if you think about the process, does the employee believe, does the company believe that the process saves time and money? There are so many processes that have been going on for so long that a change seems to be a hindrance rather than a help. So the rate of adoption is very slow.

David "Deke" Welles, Jr. (ThermaTru Doors): It's really in one-to-one, it's to work partnering with a key customer. Use that as the plot, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's going to fit for your next big customer down the list.

Clive Mendelow (Binswanger Management): Another point to make about public vs. private exchanges is you're offering an arena where there's a combination of both. You have to combine the concept of a public exchange, which provides data, and the concept of a Web-enabled private exchange, which provides fulfillment.

I'd be very interested to ask the group what they're seeing in terms of service and the Internet. We're a privately-held organization, so we talked to our customers to find out what they really wanted. We found they wanted information, and they wanted to have a communication platform for information and a platform for reporting to them. They also wanted to have a platform for actually performing transactions during projects on the Internet. So we tried to create something that had those three components.

Jake Gosa (American Woodmark): The one-size-fits-all solution is rarely attractive. That's because we're always trying to figure out how to innovate our way into this competitive advantage and to out-compete somebody to solve problems. Automating the old processes is really not going to confer any lasting benefits. More and more, we're locating facilities so we can create more unique relationships, as opposed to locating facilities so we just aggregate and do the same thing as everyone else. We get very concerned about stymieing innovation through aggregating competitors in the everybody-do-it-the-same-way style.

Ed Teixeira (ATC Healthcare Services): We went back to some good old business basics. You have to really look at what the client wants. I became convinced that what we need to do is become more of an enabler. Go to a client that could probably utilize some increased technology, but at the same time, since they're clients, increase and enhance our relationship with them.

What the Culture Will Bear

Burt Steinberg (The Dress Barn): Each one of these exchanges really depends upon which process we're doing and which process we best function under. Each one of the processes that goes on in our business has to be defined first, and then you define which exchange--independent, consortium, private--will best serve those processes. I really feel that over time, we're going to find that all three will exist.

One of the most important things is to take a look at the culture of your company. You have to look at your people; what they're capable of, will they be willing to do this, and how can you move them to do that. And that's really the question at hand: What processes fit into which ones better, not will one exist vs. the other.

Alan Weinberger (The ASCII Group and TechnologyNet): You've got to provide that customer service. Once somebody creates what is, in effect, a public standard, it's in everybody's economic interest to support it--unlike a proprietary standard. The problem is, should it be owned by the government or should it be private?

Klaus Dorfi (Atlantic Mutual Insurance Co.): We've been around for 175 years and I think one of the ways you stay around is by being flexible and knowing your strengths, while not closing your mind to emerging technologies. You have to be unafraid to work with competitors. Once you introduce competitors, the environment changes, but it can really be in your best interest if you're not afraid to compete. Then you can bring service providers into the equation and do it at lower costs. So I'm very interested in private exchanges. I think they can be very, very efficient, but you don't necessarily have to change your business models or eliminate distributors who may be part of your strength.

Tom Wajnert (Seismiq): Does a public exchange make sense? If you look at our experience over the past year, we've probably seen 7-10 public exchanges launched...and they've all failed. I don't know if this is a fair test in our industry because the bargaining power of suppliers is very high right now.

All the buyers in the world want to participate in the exchanges but the suppliers, who have the power today, don't want to do it. Now, the business cycle will hopefully change and we will have a different environment. It may be that a public exchange in our industry will work.

Jeff Jones (Lands' End): When you go back to fundamental business models, you go back to what works. I hear the conversation being tactical rather than strategic. The network, or how we go at it, is more about tactics. The idea of what customers need or want is strategic. We keep dealing with the issues we hear about from customers and then we transfer that to our B2B business. Our B2B business, up until the last two months, has had a compounded growth rate of more than 17 percent a year for the past seven years. But we only added the Internet capability to it the last three and that made it more profitable.

Pollard: What happens when your early adoption of the innovated technology of the Net, which is cutting into your costs, is not so innovative anymore because the world slowly catches up?

Jones: It's a great question. It is brutal and before you initiate it and go down that path, you better deal with the reality of your technology department, and what they can deliver.

If you stay with it and you have a vision that will help your business model, then there's an advantage to it when you think about it strategically. We go to the customer for growth; we go to the supply chain for cost efficiency. We import today somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-billion dollars of apparel. About 80 percent of that is all electronic commerce and we're about to force every vendor to the point where they must be e-commerce-enabled.

Pollard: It's all private?

Jones: All private. The public side, though, is wide open. Instead of building private virtual stores for Merck or Singulair or Saturn or others one at a time, we're about to build a virtual store for 1,000 companies to shop in. Anybody and everybody who wants to come in, we'll load them and their preferences into the customer file. If you don't want your employees wearing jeans, they can't go in that department. If you want them to wear twills and they get a benefit and a discount, they can go there.

Pollard: So Big Brother is not only watching you now--he's controlling you.

Jones: It's a great employee benefit.

Ahmad-Llewellyn: We had a vision that in the real-estate industry, you create this kind of very, very specific model where you limit the employees' ability to go anywhere other than where they are authorized to go, to buy anything other than what they are authorized to buy, and to spend beyond their limit. It would be impossible. Same model.

People who have the ability to spend and dictate where the dollars go are loath to have anybody restrict that spending. So, that's a perfect model, but it's a long-term implementation.

Kathryn Creech (Miavita): I always think the mantra of the Internet is exactly what you were speaking about-- what I want, when I want it. If it's a company, you want it customized for the corporation, and then the individual employee wants it totally personalized for them.

The company wants to control it and make sure it's relevant to their work force, using the Internet as a vehicle to deliver very customized and personalized programs cost-effectively, but the value proposition has got to be there-- that never went away.

Barry Naft (Environment International): Nothing's going to slow down technology and it's moving at an awfully rapid rate now. It's the promise of technology that drove values up and the lack of delivering it that brought them back down. And I can't figure out where to be in that cycle. If I don't get on the leading edge, I'm going to be obsolete. If I get on the leading edge, I'm going to lose my customer base. It's a very tough thing to be on the services side.

Mendelow: The one thing I would respectfully suggest--that I think is a rule --is that while we're going through it, we keep one hand firmly on the shoulder of the customer at all times, the old-fashioned way. Eyeball to eyeball, face to face, and really maintain a basic relationship with the customer while we figure out how to enable ourselves technologically with them.. .because if you communicate through technology endlessly month after month, that erodes the relationship.

Welles: I think the true opportunity here, and the one that's hard for me to get my arms around, is using the Web to enhance relationships throughout the chain, and to look at it not just as a business process improvement chain, but as a product development chain. How can we leverage the richness of the Web and the interconnection that it brings us to grow our top line? We can be incredibly efficient at the end of the day by doing all kinds of cost cutting, but if nobody wants to buy our products, it doesn't matter.

Steinberg: Is it technology or is it the customer? Both are very important. You can't separate the two.

Starr: I have two points. One is, you'll choose to operate different ways with companies with whom you share sales information so they can invest in new plans than you will with somebody from whom you buy commodity items and try to get something at the lowest price and only enter into short-term contracts with. And it goes the same with the customer's side. We need to think about the kind of ongoing relationship we want to have and then put some of these capabilities behind it. That's strategic.

The other thing is, people are doing things like joint product development over the Internet now with some of their customers. TSMC, a chip manufacturer, is now deploying Internet-based engineering design capabilities. A few of the design houses they work with have found they can design new products so much more quickly with TSMC that they're reluctant to switch to other suppliers and they've increased the switching costs with some of those customers by starting to use some of these capabilities.

Tom Leppert (The Turner Corp.): Our biggest challenge is to get our people to use the technology, because our biggest asset is really our people. Our challenge is trying to take all of the technologies, make them understandable, and get the adoption through the system. The technology is actually the easy part. The challenge is changing the cultures and changing the uses of the technologies by our own people--that to me is the most difficult aspect.

Looking into the Future

Ahmad-Llewellyn: In the bottling industry, Coke and a lot of major players formed something called Transora, modeled after the car industry. Theoretically, we'll all come together, look at the supply chain, decide how we want this process to work, and in essence, we will dictate to our suppliers in the chain what they need to do if they're going to continue doing business with us. That was two years ago. Transora still hasn't picked a technology company, and still hasn't decided on what information will be shared.

It's designed to be a very huge private and public marketplace, and I envision that probably 10 years from now, it may operate on certain levels, mainly around purchasing, transporting of reports and information and being able to instantaneously share information around certain pieces of the supply chain. I don't know how successful it's going to be in really bringing buyers and sellers together in the way that it's envisioned. But it will be interesting to see what happens.

Leppert: Maybe you're right. Maybe it's going to be 10 years. I personally don't think it's going to take that long, but you made an interesting point about how it's going to work.

Our business today really has two separate components. One is the hard matrix: quality, delivery, and price. The other, which is a little softer, is the fact that we spend a lot of time with our customers, where they're evaluating our ability to go out and plan for the future with them in terms of design, development, new products, and materials. Their purchasing initiatives are based on both components. Our fear as far as where this thing potentially can go is that everything can become a short-term commodity. If you cannot afford to keep making that investment in the long term, then what's driving your revenue stream is short-term quality delivery price--period.

Copacino: Part of what we're hearing is there's no uniform answer for any company or any industry where the issues are different, depending on whether you're dealing on the sell side or the buy side. The answer is going to be different for every company. Some will use just private, others will use a combination of public and private for different commodities and different product groups.

Welles: We have to encourage our people not to get locked into one approach. At some point there might be a convergence, but I don't see that coming soon and I'm not so worried about making that happen soon.

Ken Bauer (Long Island Rail Road): We're working on enabling the customer to purchase tickets automatically through the Internet, and we've put out schedules and things like that for better information. But internally, we're a company that has a "touch" culture; and on the purchasing side we're attempting to automate old processes to get buy-in from a variety of different individuals, while at the same time, we're forcing standards that don't exist today. But we hope that by getting that buy-in, we can start taking it to another level.

Hudson: In the turbine engine business, intellectual property is the underpinning of almost everything we do in the creation of value. We all jump into these things together and we're going to have aggregated product teams, and everyone's going to work together, but in the end, who does all this belong to and how do we separate out the value?

Weinberger: A lot of our forward momentum in the next couple of years will be driven not by finance but by basic business practices. You've got to make a profit and you've got to cut your overhead and you've got to be more efficient; and therefore, the enabling technology is going to make the food chains more efficient. Intellectual property and the legal issues as to who owns what, once everybody can get on the same Web site: that's probably going to be fought out in the courts and that's another major, major problem because how do you control who owns what?

Teixeira: It seems there's probably somewhat of a reluctance to get too much into the public arena regarding B2B. It's probably more of a dream for many of us because of the feat that we're going to be participating with competitors.

Richman: It comes back to the process and those applications when we start to look at really implementing things. So can we look at applications that can be adopted more quickly than others so we can see an impact and not potentially have to wait years for that? And then can we take some of these applications back to our corporate partners--because we do try to facilitate B2B relationships between them--and actually see those come into play?

Naft: I think we're going to have to be very honest and objective about providing added value. A great idea doesn't represent value if it can't be integrated into the system. We have to do that in a way where we can make an honest return on the services we've provided. And that means replacing burn rates with a real projection of ROIs and being creative in how we strike a balance between technology and the reality of existing legacy systems.

David Moore (24/7 Media): I'm going to continue to encourage our people to use these applications or develop these applications to elevate our customer satisfaction, which, for us, is the big payoff.

Jones: I'm thinking about how to raise the bar for some of the junior executives in our organization as far as how to tactically leverage these opportunities. We need to continue to work on getting people to be knowledge workers--to use technology to empower people to serve the customer better. To borrow phrases from some people here, I'd like to reinforce the message in our company with simple statements like "one hand on the shoulder of our customer." We do that with more than 1.5 million phone calls a month. It's a visual that people really get. It defines the relationship that you want to have when you hang up the phone or hit the stop button on the Web.

Starr: We've got the opportunity to either enter new channels or change the structure of the channels we saw through, and maybe identify new services we can offer out to the market, and get into new partnerships through some of these Internet-based capabilities. That to me is the biggest thing we do after this. And we have to enhance our core business by taking very in-depth looks at how we operate with our strategic partners--be they customers or suppliers--and customizing the things we've put in place. Through that, we can try to deepen all of the things we do together, be it looking at how much inventory is available in the real-estate market or designing a new product, etc. As far as those transient relationships where we can get some efficiencies, we can look for better prices and we can use some of these methods to do that, but we're not going to invest the people and the resources that it takes to do things on a customized basis or for the long term because those relationships won't be there. It's not worth the same amount of energy.

Leppert: The cost of these sorts of things, is very, very high. You've got to make a determination--are you going to ante up? Because if somebody does that in our industry and we don't ante up, we'll watch complete businesses walk away. It raises the risk, but the good side is that the winners win much bigger than they ever have before.

Pollard: The whole question of first mover advantage, in this technological revolution, scared a lot of people into moving fast a year or two ago. And with benefit of hindsight, you can see that a lot of the first mover advantage really wasn't there, and therefore, you didn't really need to be scared into making that move.

Leppert: It's not first mover--it's right mover. What you're going to see, or hope you're going to see, is people looking at the value and saying, "Okay, let me make sure I spend the money in the right way."

Mendelow: One of the functions about the first mover concept is it was easy to be a first mover when the venture capitalists were lobbing money like there was no tomorrow. Now things have settled down a little bit, there's no general principal, no single rule.

It's all customization and it's all got to be tailored, and then the question is, tailored to what? Customized to what?

You have to take a combination of two elements. One is your brand value. You have to look at your company and say, what values do we have, what are our brand values, what do we stand for, and then what do our customers want? Then you have to marry the two and do it in such a way that you can afford it, where you do your EVA analysis and it makes sense to you.

Hudson: The real challenge now is going to be getting good e-business thinkers who understand where value is created in the business and who aren't just implementing things that seem to be the right thing to do at the time.

Jamison: Our customers are pretty directive so we're going to keep paying attention to what they want and doing the bits and pieces as efficiently as we can. Internally we're working at integrating our own internal systems and moving that down into our supply chains, so we'll be ready if this thing moves.

Wajnert: The technologies are tools, not business models in themselves. Very few of those have been successful. American business in general is moving very quickly to adopt these technologies in the way they should be adopted, to incorporate them into business models to serve clients and customers.

Dorfi: There's no magic formula here. You have to understand the strategic nature of your business and have some vision as to where B2B might fit in or how technology might fit in. Simply dealing with commodity-type transactions at a low cost is going to be a losing strategy because low cost becomes zero cost at some point. So the challenge is--particularly if you're in a business of high end or customized service, which is really the way of the future--how do you do that or how do you define it, and where does technology fit in as far as accomplishing that?

Glassman: Technology provides a great many opportunities to do things better, differently, to provide a different set of services, but internally our key challenge is to get people to adopt the new technology and use it in a more creative way. That may mean getting people to collaborate more effectively across the organization.

But the question remains, how do we do that? It's been an issue for quite some time, and one I'm sure people have a lot of experience with, and perhaps some frustration with as well. It may require some realignment so people can communicate and work together more effectively, and some new performance measures, perhaps changes to the incentive system, and then training and education so that people have an understanding of what they need to do to win.

Who's WHO 

* Shahara Ahmad-Llewellyn is vice chairman of New York City-based The Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Co., a $395 million beverage distributor.

* Kenneth J. Bauer is president of Jamaica, NY-based Long Island Rail Road, the largest commuter railroad in the U.S. at $365 million.

* William C. Copacino is global managing partner specializing in supply chain management at Accenture, a $10 billion management and technology consulting company.

* Kathryn Creech is CEO of New York City-based Miavita, an online portal providing healthy living solutions.

* Klaus G. Dorfi is chairman and CEO of New York City-based Atlantic Mutual Insurance Co., a $ 1 billion provider of property and casualty insurance.

* David M. Glassman is partner of Stern Stewart, an "EVA" consultancy firm based in New York City.

* James J. Gosa is president and CEO of Winchester, VA-based American Woodmark Corporation, a $387 million manufacturer and distributor of kitchen cabinets and vanities.

* S. Michael Hudson is vice chairman of Rolls-Royce Corp., an aircraft engine manufacturer based in Indianapolis, IN.

* Gary L Jamison is president of UGN, an auto sound control parts manufacturer based in Chicago.

* Jeffrey A. Jones is COO of Dodgeville, WI-based Lands' End, a $1 billion clothing, shoe, and accessory retailer.

* Thomas C. Leppert is chairman and CEO of Dallas, TX-based The Turner Corp., a $4 billion construction group.

* Clive Mendelow is COO of Philadelphia, PA-based Binswanger Management Corporation, an industrial and commercial brokerage consulting firm.

* David J. Moore is CEO of New York City-based 24/7 Media, an online ad outsourcing services provider.

* Barry Naft is president and CEO of Environment International, a recycled products manufacturer based in Potomac, MD.

* Debra Richman is president and CEO of Besthalf.com, a New York City-based Internet portal for seniors.

* C. Edwin Starr is partner specializing in supply chain management at Accenture, a $10 billion management and technology consulting company.

* Burt Steinberg is president and COO of The Dress Barn, a $656 million clothing and accessory retailer based in Suffem, NY.

* Barry S. Stemlicht is chairman and CEO of White Plains, NY-based Starwood Hotels and Resorts, a $4 billion hotel and gaming company.

* Ed Teixeira is COO of New Hyde Park, NY-based ATC Healthcare Services, a healthcare services provider.

* Tom Wajnert is chairman, president, and CEO of Seismiq, a financial services provider based in Naples, FL.

* Randall A. Weghorst is president and CEO of Collierville, TN-based AOC-Resins, a $350 million polyester resin manufacturer.

* Alan Weinberger is chairman and CEO of Bethesda, MD-based ASCII Group, one of the largest computer reseller groups, and the founder of TechnologyNet.

* David "Deke" Welles, Jr. is chairman of Therma-Tru Doors, a $200 million manufacturer of metal and fiberglass doors based in Maumee, OH.