Thursday

emaring trent in e-business

ABSTRACT:

E-business has grown dramatically in the last ten years. Its only constant is change. Awareness of these changes can help both business and customers better utilize and take advantage of e-business. The e-business is one of the biggest thing that has taken the business by a storm. It is creating an entire new economy, which has a huge potential and is fundamentally changing the way businesses are done. It has advantages for both buyers as well as sellers and this win-win situation is at the core of its phenomenal rise. Though there are some weak links, with improvements in technology, they will be ironed out, making the e-business easy, convenient and secure.

OBJECTIVE OF E-BUSINESS:

· improve service

· save time

time taken by customers
elapsed time for processes

· reduce process errors

· reduce the cost of core service provision

· free staff to provide value added services

· improve morale

· give people the tools and time they need

E-BUSINESS:

"E-Business" may be defined as the application of information and communication technologies in support of all the activities of business. Commerce constitutes the exchange of products and services between businesses, groups and individuals and can be seen as one of the essential activities of any business. Electronic business focuses on the use of ICT to enable the external activities and relationships of the business with individuals, groups and other businesses.

Electronic business methods enable companies to link their internal and external data processing systems more efficiently and flexibly, to work more closely with suppliers and partners, and to better satisfy the needs and expectations of their customers.

In practice, e-business is more than just e-commerce. While e-business refers to more strategic focus with an emphasis on the functions that occur using electronic capabilities, e-commerce is a subset of an overall e-business strategy. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the World Wide Web or the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners and to improve efficiency using the Empty Vessel strategy. Often, e-commerce involves the application of knowledge management systems.

E-business involves business processes spanning the entire value chain: electronic purchasing and supply chain management, processing orders electronically, handling customer service, and cooperating with business partners. Special technical standards for e-business facilitate the exchange of data between companies. E-business software solutions allow the integration of intra and inter firm business processes. E-business can be conducted using the Web, the Internet, intranets, extranets, or some combination of these.

Basically, electronic commerce (EC) is the process of buying, transferring, or exchanging products, services, and/or information via computer networks, including the internet. EC can also be benifited from many perspective including business process, service, learning, collaborative, community. EC is often confused with e-business.

Applications can be divided into three categories:

Internal business systems:

Enterprise communication and collaboration:

electronic commerce - business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B) or business-to-consumer electronic commerce (B2C):

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer relationship management denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an integrated computer-based system used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organization and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. Built on a centralized database and normally utilizing a common computing platform, ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise-wide system environment.

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems. It is often viewed as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems.

Human resource management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organization's most valued assets the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business. The terms "human resource management" and "human resources" (HR) have largely replaced the term "personnel management" as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organizations. In simple words, HRM means employing people, developing their capacities, utilizing, maintaining and compensating their services in tune with the job and organizational require men

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, Voice over IP) is a general term for a family of methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services — voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications — that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.

content management system (CMS) is the collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based

Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages across the Internet or other computer networks. Originally, email was transmitted directly from one user to another computer. This required both computers to be online at the same time. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Users no longer need be online simultaneously and need only connect briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Voicemail (or voice-mail, vmail or VMS, sometimes called message bank) is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people. The term is also used more broadly, to denote any system of conveying voice message, including the answering machine.

Web conferencing is used to conduct live meetings, training, or presentations via the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendees' computers or a web-based application where the attendees access the meeting by clicking on a link distributed by e-mail (meeting invitation) to enter the conference.

Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, or e-business consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use 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.

Online shopping is the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time, without an intermediary service, over the Internet. If an intermediary service is present the process is called electronic commerce. An online shop, eshop, e-store, internet shop, webshop, webstore, online store, or virtual store evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a bricks-and-mortar retailer or in a shopping mall. The process is called Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online shopping. When a business buys from another business it is called Business-to-Business (B2B) online shopping. Both B2C and B2B online shopping are forms of e-commerce.

Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers. Supply Chain Management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption (supply chain).

E-Business Trends:

If you're serious about growing your online business, you need to know where your market is and how to reach it. What does the future of internet marketing look like right now? Pretty much like a teenager. Just take a look at today's teens, and here's what you'll see:

iPods loaded with music they've selected
Cell phones used constantly for text messaging, sending photos or short video clips, web surfing and talking
Wireless laptops that can link to the internet from pretty much anywhere

And what are these kids doing on their computers?

Reading new blog posts and special-interest sites via RSS feeds
Watching viral videos friends send them
Hanging out at social networking sites with people who share their interests
Creating their own web content and uploading it so other people can see it

These kids have some things to tell us online business owners. They tell us that people are creating their own personal web experience. They're creating networks of trust made up of people, groups and business they want to hear from. They're eliminating what's irrelevant to them and pulling in only what they consider significant. And they're using a whole array of tools to do this, while accessing a full range of media.that means that if we want to market to today's internet audience, we've got to become part of their trusted networks and use the same tools and media to reach them with content they want to see. And that boils down to one thing: segment, segment, segment.

Target Your Customers' Desires:
According to a recent study from Jupiter Research, segmenting lists based on behavior data--what customers bought, where they clicked on a website and other information--improved e-mail open rates by 165 percent and click-through rates by 147 percent over unpersonalized, unsegmented e-mails. Conversion rates were up 355 percent and revenues were an amazing 781 percent higher.

Giving people what they want is the best way to build the kind of trust that can shoot your numbers up like that. And as people become even less patient with messages and content they don't want, precision targeting will become even more vital. However, the majority of marketers haven't caught on yet. The Jupiter Research study said only 11 percent of marketers use behavior data to segment their lists and target their most likely customers.

How can you stay ahead of the curve? Improved analytics and metrics are making it possible to collect specific data, such as:

Where individual visitors are coming from
Exactly which pages they view
Which links they click on

That, along with the other data you collect from your sales history or analytics reports, gives you the tools to give your opt-ins what they want and keep you in their networks.

EMERGING TREND IN E-BUSINESS:

Pure play dotcoms in many industries are unlikely to be successful.

Full benefits of e-business cannot be realized in isolation of the overall business goals and absence of an offline presence.

To be successful in e-business arena enterprises need to invest as much in non-IT related spending as in IT- related spending.

Examine / reexamine use of Internet for all business functions and prioritise e-commerce investments.

Due to slump in the global economy, big firms are getting bigger and small ones are getting smaller, finding it difficult to bag new or renew contracts.

Top 25 Indian companies have contributed the total software exports of the country in 2000 for 75%

Top 50 companies considered the total percentage as 85 to 95%

Of all the total 900 software firms registered with NASSCOM the percentage is 5 to 15%

Out sourcing exports involving small projects, which are predominantly in the SME, sector had dried up. Need should be there for linkage between big and SMEs.

Inspite of slow down in spending on IT by US and European countries and impact found on SMEs,
European Unions IT division had agreed to fund collaboration between SMEs in Europe and India for software business development.

Software exports grew in the 1st quarter of 2000-2001 at 6 to 12% (Rs. 8,500 9,000 crores)

For the fourth successive year, it is hoped that software exports would maintain a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) by 35%.

Target for achieving software exports by the year 2008 is US $ 50 billion.

Indian IT Industry will be affected by ups and downs in some quarter and many firms have cash reserves.

In addition to the above data ICRA² has made a comparison study for the year 2000 and 2005 in analyzing the e-commerce activities in India. It has predicted a more than 50 fold increase in e-commerce business in India. E-commerce would take a larger hold of service oriented industries such as Banking, Leisure and Travel and Education.

CONCLUSION:
Each organization will embark on e-business initiatives that make sense for its particular situation improve service and reduce the processing time. The e-business have become very familiar for reduce in the processing error. e-business still has to make business sense and should be judge by the same set of metrics that any other initiative in an organization will be measured by technology will keep on evolving and each organization will decide its own route

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trend in e- business