E-Business

Business-to-business e-business is now a reality for most large organizations. They recognize that communicating with customers, partners and suppliers using traditional electronic channels such as electronic funds transfer (EFT), electronic mail (Email) and electronic data interchange (EDI) speeds up business processes and reduces costs significantly.

In their drive to stay competitive, these large companies have spent millions on enterprise resource planning (ERP) and advanced planning solutions.

Implementations of such systems are extremely costly and disruptive events that involve enormous changes to the internal environments of these companies.

Yet, once having gone through the painful ordeal, many have reached a higher level of efficiency and find themselves in a quandary because their internal efficiencies have far outstripped the capabilities of their trading partners' information exchange programs. These large companies are now looking to move forward with next-generation supply-chain management capabilities. This step will involve all the small, medium and large companies they do business with. The message will be friendly, but clear…. Get connected or else!

To be successful in the Internet age, you have to do more than just build an e-commerce front-end; you must extend e-business into your enterprise’s core business processes. It integrates with the front-end office systems and the backend office systems or to enable real-time customer marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, commerce transactions and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems.

The following diagram represents a total integrated end-to-end e-business architecture for a fully enabled enterprise. If you wish to learn more about the components of this diagram enroll in ICE-University and get your E-MBA. ICE-U will soon make this diagram become an interactive source of information and links to help you understand, plan and implement your end-to-end fully enabled e-business solution.

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