The current fragmented execution of the required service value chain does not match the changed market needs. To ensure cost-effective fulfilment, performance monitoring is a must. In this respect, companies increasingly focus less on the individual enterprise performance and more on the global performance of the various service providers – the “ecosystem” - and the influence of the enterprise on the ecosystem, of which they are supposedly the beneficiary. This is the result of outside factors becoming as important to enterprise performance as those inside: the performance of suppliers, channels, service partners, third-party products and others involved in the value chain. Time has come to shift from a fragmented series of happenings, leading to undue delays and lack of transparency, to a collaborative, action-flow managed fulfilment process with seamless transition between the various value chain stages.This is the theory of the “Real-Time Community”, as described by Gartner and assessed by all major business analysts and business management institutions, which UBench successfully converts into state of the art applications in support of different business processes.

Improvements in performance will come from tighter collaboration (read business integration) with key suppliers. One could argue that community performance is not controllable when there is no direct ownership, but as companies like Wal-Mart, Toyota and others have shown with their supply-chain strategies, direct influence can be even stronger than direct ownership.

Many electronic business applications are failing to meet their business targets because of a lack of integration with back-office systems. These current technical weakness are complemented by new technologies that make real-time operation more feasible. They include application integration tools, mobile data services and "always on" Internet access (fixed and mobile).