Intermediary

Understanding Intermediary

An agent qualifies as an intermediary only if it is directly involved in the transaction or modification of the enterprise’s product without using that product itself (as a subject resource or work group) — formally, it must either be a counter-party to the transaction or help determine the customer, the contract terms, or the transactional environment. It acts on the enterprise’s product in one of four ways: providing a further manufacturing process, distributing the product, subsidizing the enterprise’s product, or otherwise connecting the enterprise with the customer; these map onto the three coded Intermediary Type Marker subtypes: Agent Intermediary (networking function), Payer Intermediary (subsidy/payment), and With Inventory Intermediary (takes and resells inventory). This lets the model represent routes to market that a direct producer-to-customer model cannot capture. Only two intermediaries are ever recorded in the barcode; when more than two exist in reality, they are ranked by importance (impact on the enterprise’s ability to sell to the customer) and only the top two are captured, arranged temporally. Shipping and transportation companies are excluded from the category entirely: despite being critical to the exchange of goods, they are so pervasive that including them would appear redundantly in nearly every barcode, making them poor distinguishers between product lines. The Intermediary Locus itself is coded to the agent’s general economic function, not its contextualized role in this particular supply chain — e.g., Verizon reselling Motorola phones is coded by Verizon’s own primary function, not as a role specific to phone retailing.