2. Elemica provides a community for participants where they can transact, coordinate, and cooperate to produce products for less. Yet these firms also compete with one another when they sell chemicals to end-user firms in the automobile, airline, and manufacturing industries. How is this possible?

It may seem unusual to refer to an entire industry as a community, a word reserved typically for collections of people who more or less know one another. Trade associations are one example of an industrial community. Trade associations form in an effort to pursue the interests of all members in the community although usually they do not include customers in the community. Elemica is a B2B cloud-based, supply chain platform aiming to revolutionize the entire supply chain of the chemical, tire and rubber, energy, and other process industries worldwide. Elemica’s purpose is not just to foster cooperation on a one-to-one inter-firm basis, or just to foster collaboration on multi-firm projects, but instead to lift all boats on an industry tide by providing an inter-firm platform for communicating B2B information, and thereby making all firms more efficient. Elemica calls itself a supply chain operating network ecosystem. Elemica is one of the few survivors of the early B2B e-commerce years. Elemica today processes nearly $400 billion in annual transactions across more than 7,500 process industry trading partners. Clients include BASF, BP, Continental, The Dow Chemical Company, DuPont, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, LANXESS, Michelin, Shell, Solvay, Sumitomo Chemical, and Wacker. Fourteen of the top 15 chemical companies, as well as 83 of the top 100, conduct commerce using Elemica’s network.

Elemica was an early example of a B2B e-commerce industry consortium. It was founded by 22 leading corporations in the chemical industry (including oil and industrial gases) to provide cloud-based order management and supply chain applications and services. A single platform provides one-stop shopping so that companies can buy and sell products to one another through their own enterprise systems or using a web alternative. It also helps companies automate all of their business processes, creating efficiencies and economies of scale that lead to an improved bottom line. In 2016 Elemica was purchased by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm. With additional capital resources, Elemica is planning to expand its trading ecosystem to a broader range of industries.