E-business

E-business

E-business

Introduction

Diesel S.p.A. is an Italian design company. It is best known for clothing aimed at the young adult market, particularly jeans, but the brand can now be found on everything from underwear to fragrances. The company is owned by its founder Renzo Rosso, and is based in Molvena in northern Italy.

Discussion

Since the World Wide Web (WWW or W3) became popular through point- as well as -click programs that made it easier for non-technical people to use the Internet, over 21,000 businesses and corporations have become accessible through the Internet. These companies range from corporate giants like IBM, AT&T, Ford and J.C. Penny, to small law firms. 'With the Internet, the whole globe is one marketplace as well as the Internet's information-rich WWW pages can help companies reach new customers,' says Bill Washburn, former executive director of Commercial Internet Exchange.

The adoption of Internet technologies has provided distinct value propositions to the Diesel. These come from the offering of information online, the possibility of establishing electronic communications and exchange of information and the conducting of transactions online (Soto-Acosta and Meroño-Cerdan, 2006). With regard to the offering of information online, Internet technologies present high reach and richness of information (Mahajan 2003). Reach refers to the number of people that are reachable quickly and cheaply through these technologies and richness relates to the depth and detail of information that can be provided. Internet technologies can also be a source of value creation to the firm through efficient intra- and inter-organizational communications. With an Intranet's ability to provide intra-organizational communication at reduced cost, employees can distribute and communicate their ideas more readily, enabling them to be more involved in the decision-making process (Ray 2004).

Other alternatives come from the possibility of hosting discussion forums, where employees can create and share knowledge, which may be used for group learning. Moreover, effective communications are necessary when building and maintaining long-term customer relationships (Kaplan 2000) and (Heldal 2004). Thus, lots of businesses are now competent in terms of offering after-sales support through their website. Moreover, Internet technologies allow customer retention by leveraging various interactive applications such as loyalty programs and virtual communities (Grover 1998). In this sense, Web forums enable the creation of virtual communities that bond participants to a particular website.

Diesel using the Internet to make direct connections with their customers and as well to secure Internet connections to intensify relations with some of their trading partners, and using the Internet's reach and ubiquity to request quotes or sell off perishable stocks of goods or services by auction. The Internet is helping Diesel to lower costs dramatically across their supply and demand chains, take their customer service into a different league, enter new markets, create additional revenue streams and redefine their business relationships. A recent worldwide survey of 500 large companies carried out jointly by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Booz Allen and Hamilton, a consultancy, found that more than 90% of top managers believe the Internet will transform or have a big impact on the ...