For Charley Amos, branch manager of Bearing Chain & Supply in Dallas, the e-commerce site he clicks to for spot buys works just fine, thank you.

Since November Amos has ordered everything from mounted bearings to speed reducers on PTplace.com, which offers products from four major power transmission manufacturers. Last year he used the site mainly to check parts availability. Amos says his company now buys products totaling $30,000 to $40,000 a month and tracks shipments online.

"Most of it is spot orders from customers and sometimes we're out of stock. A lot of times I'll sign on and leave it on" all day, he says.

A few buying-selling sites like PTplace.com are expected to keep growing, which is no small feat in the wake of last year's dot-com collapse, according to distributors and industry consultants. Repeat buyers such as Amos enjoy other time-saving tools like online product configuration and real-time inventory checks. Some sites actually fulfill their chief promise — to reduce costs for distributors and suppliers.

Yet those sites won't be the main playing field for online B2B collaboration in the next few years, according to industry leaders. The real action will be distributors and manufacturers exchanging business documents and synchronizing product item numbers electronically.

More firms are also expected to integrate their internal business applications as a "pre-requisite to the big payoff: external connectivity," says Tom Orlowski, vice president of information systems at the National Assn. of Manufacturers.

For distributors, the primary benefits of e-business collaboration are expected to come from streamlined supplier transactions. Some companies are also applying new technology to ease customer transactions. Here are two examples:

Electronic components distributor Newark Electronics saved $1.2 million in one year by implementing a hosted exchange to transfer purchase orders, PO acknowledgements, and other information with its suppliers that were traditionally done by fax, paper or email. Inefficient and errant communication with vendors had resulted in inventory increases due to over-ordering, stock-outs, and extra purchasing paperwork. Newark's sales reps were spending extra time expediting problem orders.

Newark selected a service that sends and translates electronic documents into a format preferred by the supplier, and which interfaces with its back-end accounting and ERP systems. From early 2000 to May, 2001, Newark's PO acknowledgement rate jumped from 33 to 94 percent, the company says.

Kaman Industrial Technologies offers customers several digital services to make transactions easier. One is direct vendor access, available from Kaman's Web site, where qualified end users can check Kaman's inventory and even some vendors' inventory when the distributor does not have it in stock. Another is providing customers that have multiple facilities a way to track invoices and shipping histories for each location.

In a move that anticipates the industry's eventual adoption of Extensible Markup Language, the distributor expected to begin accepting purchase orders this spring in XML format, which would be routed to a branch, and automatically generate an electronic ticket and in-voice. XML is a next-generation programming language that is expected to surpass HTML on the Web and EDI as the standard for business transactions be-cause it tags complex documents and makes them more easily translatable than HTML does. Adopting XML is expected to cut transaction costs and will allow Kaman to connect more easily to procurement networks large customers use, says Brian Lombardo, Kaman Direct's e-Business manager.

Not many small and mid-sized distributors do the kinds of electronic transactions with suppliers and customers that larger firms like Kaman and Newark Electronics engage in. But adoption of so-called private exchanges among distributors and their vendors is on the rise. Experts say this will occur more rapidly than the use of similar exchanges among distributors and end users.

Only 42 percent of distributors said they exchange business documents via electronic data interchange or do vendor managed inventory, according to the 55th Annual Survey of Distributor Operations published by ID and Reed Business Information last year. For small distributors that have resisted the expense and time required to implement EDI, more options are becoming available from ERP software providers and companies that offer hosted EDI services.

"Private exchanges are a way for distributors and manufacturers to coordinate their activities and reduce the costs," says Adam Fein, principal of Pembroke Consulting, a distribution channel management consultant. "People in the MRO supply chain are looking for online collaboration with their existing partners."

In last year's Facing the Forces of Change report, which Fein co-authored, distributors predicted that technology's greatest value would be communicating information about their internal operations to their business partners: tracking orders, managing inventory levels, obtaining product information, and improving order accuracy.

Fein expects that almost every MRO manufacturer will have a private exchange in place by perhaps 2006, which means a way to electronically coordinate sales, inventory and marketing with its distributors. NAM's Orlowski believes it will take much longer for end users to connect with an integrated digital supply chain.

"A lot of work has to be done in the standards area, [product] naming conventions is one,'' he says.

MRO distributors and manufacturers are seeking to cut costs through e-collaboration as never before, Fein and others say.

"This is going to be the year of the supplier, the year of e-commerce transactions for the supplier," says Andrew Duncan, CEO of Advanced Data Exchange, a provider of outsourced EDI and XML translation services for distributors and manufacturers. Newark Electronics employs ADX's service. Duncan says the cost barriers that prevented many distributors from doing EDI transactions are dropping, and he believes as sector-leading companies embrace outsourced services like ADX to cut costs, others will follow.

AMR Research estimates the market for what it calls private trading exchanges — which provide business partners tools to convert EDI protocols into XML, for example — will grow at an annual rate of 68 percent to $38 billion by 2005.

There will also be a niche role for consortia-run exchanges and the few independent online marketplaces still standing after the dot-com crash.

Consortia exchanges like Covisint, which the major automakers developed to do transactions with their suppliers, have been slow to take hold. While large OEM suppliers and distributors signed up, it's been hard pushing deeper into the supply base and getting smaller distributors to adopt the software, Fein and others say. They also suffer from the inherent problems of Fortune 500 competitors trying to work together.

"The real question is how long are they going to hang on for? And there's too many cooks in the kitchen," says Robert Segal, an e-business specialist at Frank Lynn & Associates. "I think they may dissolve into online buying groups."

"Ultimately they will become standards-setting bodies," says Fein.

Two years ago, Segal and other industry observers also tracked dozen of online marketplaces. Most of those companies fell victim to the economy and flawed business models, such as relying on transaction fees. Some of the larger ones that went public, like ChemDex, and VerticalNet, reinvented themselves and so far have survived as software providers for B2B collaboration.

Segal thinks a few online marketplaces may resurface as XML-based trading networks for existing business partners.

"The key to me in an online marketplace is driving out inefficiencies and bringing new ways of doing business," says Segal. Segal expects to see growth in XML-based private exchanges led by large companies that compel their distributors, or large buyers that compel their suppliers.

"One of the core things needed is content — product information — and only a small percent of that has been digitized," he says. "As manufacturers who own that information continually make product information and specs digital — particularly as XML schemas and language emerge, it will be easier for disparate players in a marketplace to trade info."

Finally, targeted e-commerce sites set up by manufacturers and distributors should continue to grow. Sites like thesealman.com (distributor EPM Inc.'s seals and gaskets storefront) and e-epoxy.com (Dow Chemical's site for epoxy resins) claim they are flourishing, for example.