E-BUSINESS STRATEGY AND MANAGEMENT

E-business strategy and management



E-business strategy and management

Introduction to strategy

NBC is a small building suppliers business based in a rural area of the United Kingdom. It specializes in sales of building materials and home appliances for residential customers and the trade customer. It has recently undergone massive expansion by acquiring by nine smaller stores, to add to the one large store it currently operates.

NBC now has ten retail outlets, a large central one and nine smaller outlets based between 3o and 8o miles from each one. The central store houses the head office staff, a large distribution stock centre (around 9oooo items) and a shop where customers can place the orders or buy items(Gordijn, 2001).

Each of the smaller stores has a smaller stock of common items (around 7ooo items). If an item is in stock, then the customer can either pay and take the item with them, or arrange for the items to be delivered and to be subsequently invoiced for it. If an item is not in stock, then the shop staff can phone through to the central store to check that it is held in main stock. At 3 pm every day, each store faxes to the central store a list of all items requested during the previous day and these are located onto delivery Lorries at the central store and dispatched each morning to each of the smaller outlets.

Introduction to e-commerce and e business

The business environment

The adoption of e-business requires a holistic business strategy as well as judicious combination of new and old technologies (Castro, 2002). Some enterprises will have the expertise in house to address e-business solutions, while others will require the assistance of external consultants. Success in the application of e-business technology cannot be attained without a strategy, regardless of whether these resources are internal or external. An ebusiness service may be built using pre-existing programs, whose original designer may not have known about this particular purpose(Davidson, 2002).

NBC contractor establish relationships with a number of suppliers for managing its supply chain. In this environment, the most probable path is adoption through internal projects rst to limit the risk. Some enterprises may need to integrate their internal applications, which could be used as a starting point to build ebusiness experience. Another potential fertile ground for internal projects is application integration projects stemming from merger and acquisitions or from corporate downsizing. Significant experimentation by a construction enterprise, at least for internal projects, is expected because of the potential for increasing returns. Partial less complex implementations are possible, particularly in the area of inventory management, for instance using a private definition for XML exchanges. Beyond internal e-business deployments, the next rung in the adoption ladder for a construction enterprise is the establishment of relationships with suppliers, assemblers and subcontractors(Cutler, 2000).

In Figure 2, NBC contractor is interested in enabling its existing legacy applications to conform to ebXML standards. Initially the contractor downloads from the ebXML repository the ebXML speciccations (business processes and ...