E-business is one of the hottest topics in the industry, but there is as yet little consensus on what it means to manufacturing and distribution companies. It has been said that the entire global economy is up for grabs due to the Internet.
"The choice is simple - get into e-business or go out of business," said Graham Shackle, Sales and Marketing Manager for . "When it comes to e-business, there is no such thing as a magic bullet. What makes good e-business sense for one company may prove to have little practical value for another. What must also be kept in mind is that e-business is not a quick way to earn revenue or to save money. However, it is the new and only way of doing business now and in the future."
Even though the Internet is profoundly changing how we conduct business, it is not changing the fundamentals of economics. The buy/sell roles are in flux, but e-commerce is still commerce: buying and selling. What is changing substantially is the move towards more dynamic relationships. While competition remains alive and well, many business relationships have moved away from being purely adversarial toward becoming more actively collaborative.
Working collaboratively with customers, suppliers and trading partners provides significant business benefits. For one thing, the virtual trading environment allows access to mission-critical information from scores of business collaborators. Intelligent agents can help your company pinpoint precisely what you need, and on-line auctioning will ensure that you get it at the best price. What`s more, fulfilment, contract administration, market analysis and customer feedback are vastly improved through e-business technologies.
"It is no longer enough to simply optimise supply chains - to minimise nodes and improve basic efficiencies," continued Shackle. "Today, supply chains have to be highly collaborative and increasingly service focused."
"To be successful, enterprise and supply chain solution providers must move beyond applications that address predictable functions. In e-business, nothing is predictable, except the need to support closer customer and supplier relationships that may change overnight."
The transformation to e-business is taking many forms and involves a hybrid mix of technologies. Some of the hottest and easiest to implement, Internet technologies are ideal for e-commerce, with companies seeking and finding solutions for both buying and selling activities. The latest powerful transaction based systems have been turned into tools to aid companies in conducting business like never before with collaboration over the Internet.
Traditional EDI has been transformed from a clumsy high maintenance operation into a fast, slick way of doing business - Business to Business (B2B) allows trading partners to do business, place orders check statements and inquire on stock levels and availability, Business to Consumer (B2C) entails the buying and selling of goods over the internet and has become an accepted way of transacting business through such sites as Amazon.com and eBay. These sites allow access to a storefront from anywhere in the world for anybody to buy just about anything.
"Probably the most exciting development for the immediate future is true extended supply chain management, where your business communicates with your own factories, suppliers and customers using messaging software that will communicate with any ERP system, written in any programming language, on any operating system", said Shackle. "This concept is breaking down traditional barriers that exist between competing ERP software developers by allowing customers to select `best of breed` solutions at all levels of their business."
To do this requires Sophistication Internet Order Management software, such as QAD`s eQ, which is a breakthrough eBusiness solution for Business-to-Business Collaboration, fundamentally transforming the way businesses work together. This type of software automates and streamlines the customer buying process, improves the ability to manage and service a large volume of personalized and organization relationship and accelerates the velocity of goods and information across these extended-enterprises to fulfil market demand.
"One of the advantages of this type of Software is that it will run on any Enterprise System so a business will be able to maximize investment in existing systems and purchase and implement it without having to endure the expense of new enterprise solutions," concluded Shackle.
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