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

Cycle time is the period of time required to complete a process, function or operation from start to finish. Business-to-business (B2B) E-Commerce helps company to increase their efficiencies and effectiveness by reducing the transaction costs. For example, a customer from Malaysia would like to purchase a book which is only available in the U.S. With B2B, the Malaysian customer can easily order the book and make the payment online and then receive the book within a few days’ time. This has certainly saved up a lot of cost and time for the company. It has also cut short the cycle time of the entire process and thus enhances customer’s satisfaction towards the efficiency of the company.

Meanwhile, empowerment aims at granting employees the authority and the responsibility so as to act in response to customer requests within a short time. Nowadays, no one can survive in the business world without having any IT knowledge. People now look forward to complete their tasks using the shortest time possible and with E-Commerce, such objective can be achieved at anytime. For example, employees now can work from home and cut down on traveling because traveling not only takes up a lot of time, but is also costly as well. Besides, in some companies, customer complaints are handled online. Feedbacks from the customers are recognized as to be important to the company’s growth and development. Therefore, some companies actually collect and respond to customer complaints online as it saves time and is very convenient now. I remembered last Christmas; I was shopping with my sister at Giordano, Mid Valley. I wanted a shirt very much but my size ran out of stock at that time. One of the sales girls, not wanting to disappoint me, offered to help to ask if other branches have my size. It just so happen that the Giordano at One Utama has the stock and the sales girl booked aside for me so that I could collect it from Giordano at One Utama later. The point here is, the Giordano branches are all linked together. They share effort in pleasing their customers by empowering their staffs to do so.

E-Commerce facilitates customer support by reducing inventory and overhead costs. With that, the “pull-type” supply chain management is implemented which integrates also the just-in-time (JIT) system. The “pull-type” processing system is a competitive advantage to the companies as customer gets to tailor their products and services according to their preferences. This is widely practice in Dell Computer Corporation.

Besides, shopping today is made easy with E-Commerce. Shoppers online are provided with more choices than ever. With E-Commerce, shoppers can get information they need in seconds and compare prices before purchasing. In a way, E-Commerce assists in providing competitions between suppliers. Transactions are also made easy as it enables customers to trade at any hour of the day. But then again, there are disadvantages for shopping online too. You see, there was this once when my friend and I bought some bags online. It was a Taiwanese website which I have lost the URL. The stocks came later than as promised and it turned out that some of the bags are dirty.

E-Commerce has made life easy somehow; it has its own disadvantages at the same time.

weiqi

Tuesday, June 10, 2008