The realities of e-commerce

There is one formula to success in e-commerce and that is to become a totally efficient organisation that delivers value at every stage of a customer transaction and via every customer touchpoint.

That is the view of Jay van Zyl, of Rubico Products, the Business Components Company whose focus is on the delivery of custom-fit solutions for the financial services sector.

"However, implementing that formula is easier said than done, but there is no chance of e-commerce tolerating inefficiencies in any process. Early e-commerce initiatives failed because they didn`t heed the warnings and allowed one or two weaknesses to creep in and ruin the entire customer experience.

"It might have been an inability to handle queries efficiently, a lack of integration with back office systems, or inadequate product delivery at the end of the process. Whatever the weakness, the e-commerce model proved to be totally intolerant," he says.

It is intolerant because it is an ambitious model covering so many different company outward-facing processes touching customers, suppliers and external partners, including sales, marketing, order taking, delivery, customer service, purchasing of raw materials and supplies for production and procurement of indirect operating-expense items, such as office supplies. It involves new business models and the potential to gain new revenue or lose some existing revenue to new competitors.

Van Zyl`s advice to companies embarking on an e-commerce programme is to make sure that their top priority is the successful integration of their back office systems with the e-commerce solution. "Get the internal processes right before extending out into the supply chain," he states.

"The back office is the cornerstone of e-commerce. Early e-businesses thought they could do without this tight integration, but they soon found out they couldn`t, especially when it came to collaborating with their supply chain."

A company engaged in e-commerce has a maze of complex relationships with other companies, potentially hundreds of interconnecting inter- company and intra-company processes, all of which have to be brought together in a collaborative environment.

Van Zyl maintains that to avoid becoming locked into one technology, it is essential for companies to separate their technology architecture from their business processes. Doing so will give them the flexibility and scalability they will need to accommodate future business complexities and new technologies.

One such emerging technology for e-commerce players is Web Services, generally regarded as a natural extension, or evolution of the component-based software on which Rubico`s solutions are founded.

One of the main goals of Web Services is to enable software developers to seamlessly integrate applications and services with each other, regardless of the operating system an application runs on, regardless of the object model an application depends on, and regardless of which programming language the application has been written in. The business is totally separated from the architecture.

"The promise of Web Services is to enable companies to build collaborative processes that flow seamlessly across the company`s internal systems and outwards to those of its business partners to deliver visibility and integrity across the supply chain.

"With Web Services it is finally possible to create functions that can easily be accessed over the Internet by both internal and external parties. They make it possible to integrate different value chains from different organisations with ease," concludes Van Zyl.