PERSONALIZATION & CUSTOMIZATION

Personalization & Customization

Personalization & Customization

In today's dynamic economic climate and global market-place, the pace of change is ever increasing, which demands that organizations develop integrated management systems that can cope with these changes. This means that the required changes in performance or organizational objectives are incorporated within well-planned and integrated subsystem requirements. Accordingly, successful business-wide integration has been recognized by Bititci (1995) as an important factor for competitiveness of a manufacturing business.

Web sites like My.Yahoo.com and Excite.com have offered something similar to Negroponte's model for several years. These portal sites often allow users to receive quotes from their stock portfolios, local weather reports, regional sports news, and other news items that are listed according to reader preferences. However, in the industry vernacular, this kind of personalization has come to be known instead as “customization,” because it usually involves options or preferences selected by the users from a pre-set list.

As New York Times writer Susan Stellin described it in August 2000, personalization involves information that companies have “discreetly gathered about consumers, like their purchase history or the Web pages they have viewed.” Unlike customization, which requires companies to wait for customers to tell them what they want, companies employing personalization techniques attempt to anticipate what customers will want. Users' preferences are determined based on data profiles built up through data mining, which sifts through customers' data using sophisticated algorithms to discover correlating patterns in Web usage and purchase patterns. Such data is often collected when Web sites implant information-gathering “cookies” into visitors' Web browsers, or by detecting and identifying the unique Internet protocol address of a user's computer.

Karapetrovic and Willborn (1998), in discussing system integration, stated, “A system is a set of processes and resources that are designed and performed in order to achieve a desired objective, such as a product” (p. 205).

ERP is referred to as a business management system that integrates all facets of a business, including planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. However, ERP is inward looking, and this limits its role in today's increasingly competitive supply network, which requires seamless communication between each partner in a supply-chain. To truly prosper in today's increasingly competitive business environments that rely heavily on information and communication technology (ICT), the enterprise must look for a way that enables integration with a network of suppliers and customers. A new concept—namely, the extended enterprise—that fits this purpose has emerged. An extended enterprise is referred to as a form of enterprise that integrates suppliers, manufacturers, and customers in a supply-chain through the effective use of ICT in order to improve information flow and communication between partners, with the ultimate goal of satisfying customers' needs in terms of speed and information accuracy (Weston, 2003).

A review of the literature and case studies evidence suggests that as the ERP methodology has become more popular, software applications have emerged to help business managers implement ERP in business activities such as inventory control, order tracking, customer service, finance, and human resources (Bendoly & Jacobs, ...