how E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, consists of buying and selling products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

Cycle time means the amount of time taken to complete a process. For example a process of purchase order, delivery goods and reach customer. Digitize enable the supply chain save time from internal to external needed process to the transaction such as traditional of book keeping are upgraded to digitize. Every transaction proceeds under a standard and consistency form of transaction process.

Reducing time-cycle:

E-commerce can reduce cycle time by eliminating the time taken to process in between supplier, intermediaries and customers. Through e-commerce, the customer can directly order the material needed no matter in what time zone and wherever they are with an access to the internet, because the e-commerce website is operate 7-24-365, hence the customer no need to wait until the shop is operate. E-commerce reduces time taken from shipping, inventory level, it also shortens the time taken to verify registration, account entry and transaction authorization.

Furthermore, e-commerce fully utilizes the internet to facilitate the communication with strategy suppliers and internal customer. Enhance the interaction between firm and customer to enhance the understanding between the two parties. E-commerce reduces the traditional phone calling and snail mailing that used to be ways to process transaction. However it is lack efficient and slow in progress and take time. Electronic data exchange through online allow the company to communicate with their customer even in public holidays. Eventually, it affects the whole transaction process and increase the efficiency.

Improve employees’ empowerment:

Employee empowerment can be described as giving employees’ responsibility and authority to make decisions about their work without supervisory approval. Good managers are expected to help employees refine their job achievements by encouraging, instructing, guiding and giving them advice. Employee empowerment can increase employees’ motivation, job satisfaction and loyalty to their companies. The power that managers should shared with employees is through trust, assurance, motivation, and support.

Electronic-Data-Interchange (EDI) enables the employees to have freedom and authority to access in transaction system, transparency barrier between employee and customer is clear cut. Employees in charge can have more understanding of the business and the transaction and providing relevance feedback to customer. Employees can do their job independently without supervision. On the other perspective, employees who work under these circumstances are more productivity rather than those who work under tight supervise. Nowadays, work stress is a significance issues that should be taken into consideration when dealing with employee condition. In other ways, employee can work from anywhere at any time whenever they like. Because through accessing the internet they can do everything online. It is more flexibility to employee. Productivity eventually increases in these circumstances.


Facilitate customer support:

Customer demands are more demanding nowadays. Traditional ways of doing business seem cannot be applicable for the current situation. They required more sophisticate and efficient ways of dealing with their daily demand. E-commerce is a place where the firm can fulfill every customer with different requirement. Quality of services is much more emphasize nowadays compare with the physical product. Ordinary customer required more than what the web page provide. They required immediate response for their request. Share database in between the employee is crucial for further follow up process where they can obtain customer profile and information in order to solve their problem.

Customization is an issues where the firm should highly emphasizing and concentrating, neglect this issues will cause a huge impact and change the whole picture of the business nature. Firms are encouraged to provide Graphic-user-interface (GUI) which enables the user to view and order product. Furthermore, firms can also provide some information and brief summary of their product through picture or video to clarify customers about the product. Firms might need to yearn for a better prospect therefore it is a must for firm to recognize the customer changing trends and demands. Hence, a well define feedback of the services and products are essential for the company long term improvement. They also can provide their company information to enable the customer to contact them and prepare a forum to customer to left their comment.