The eBusiness benchmark

Romuald Martin

Sujets

• management
• managers

Informations

• Publié par: Viot
• Nombre de lectures: 16
• Langue: English

Extrait

The eBusiness benchmark

Context

This eBusiness Benchmark gives an up-to-date insight into the

drivers and experiences of companies in the area of eBusiness

investments. The objective of the study has been to investigate

what companies see as the real cost and, more importantly, the

real value of their eBusiness investments. Some companies have

invested millions in the development and implementation of

eBusiness processes and applications. Others have taken a wait-

and-see approach.

The eBusiness Benchmark is an anonymous benchmarking study

performed in the distribution, wholesale and manufacturing

industry of the BeNeLux countries, but a wide variety of

companies in other industries have participated as well. The

approach we took is to do a broad study, in the sense that it takes

into account all major eBusiness application areas, but to also

investigate deep enough into each area in order to make

meaningful observations and conclusions. Therefore, the effort in

investigating individual companies was relatively high (broad

questionnaire, many interviews).

The study is performed by VINTURA, an independent consultancy

company specialized in eBusiness and Partner of ZMG.

We define eSales as doing business with customers supported by

electronic means, but with some form of user involvement. In the same

manner, we define eProcurement as doing business with suppliers

supported by electronic means, but with some form of user involvement.

eConnectivity is defined as doing business by establishing electronic links

between systems or applications of buyers, suppliers, other business

partners or other organizational entities (no direct user involvement).

Key Findings

1. eSales focus is on existing customers

eSales initiatives, like selling via a general or personalized web-shop, are

now widespread and companies are generally quite satisfied with their

initiatives and the value they get from them.

A major driver for providing these kinds of facilities is to improve the

overall service to the customers, for example ease of ordering, up-to-date

status information on customer orders and product availability. In general,

companies use eSales to "make it easy for the customer to do business"

with them. It is interesting that very few companies bother to make the

increase in service level concrete and measurable. Only some companies

manage their customer satisfaction, have measurements for their service

levels and ask their customers up-front what functionalities they want.

2. eProcurement benefits are real; the start is difficult

eProcurement, on the contrary, is still scarcely implemented and the

experiences are very divers. The focus in applying eProcurement is very

much on realizing real and measurable benefits, both from process cost

savings and from unit cost savings. A first barrier for companies to

actually start an eProcurement project is that many companies still have

very fragmented information on their company wide spend in the different

spend categories. Another, even more important, barrier is that

procurement is still not on the top of the agenda for many management

teams. Only some companies see eProcurement initiatives as a way to

support and enforce their efforts for optimizing the procurement

processes and organization.

3. eConnectivity is happening and is essential for eSales and

eProcurement

Directly linking applications and systems using internet technology, here

coined "eConnectivity", is seen as an essential pre-requisite for

eBusiness initiatives in the broadest sense. Establishing electronic links

between companies, be it using EDI or XML, reduces costs and realizes

process efficiencies. The trend towards XML as the new standard for

communication is clear and the data in the study suggests that in only two

years time XML will reach the same installed base as EDI has now. For

individual companies, EDI versus XML however is not the issue. The

important challenge is to implement a flexible, scalable and secure

connectivity platform that enables the company to connect to a variety of

business partners or organizational entities. Implementing such a

connectivity platform is not so much a cost or technology issue, but much

more an issue on concepts, business process alignment and

standardization.