Strategic analysis of E-business

Strategic analysis or situation analysis involves review of: the internal resources and processes of the company to assess its e-business capabilities and results to date in the context of a review of its activity in the marketplace; the immediate competitive environment (micro-environment), including customer demand and behaviour, competitor activity, marketplace structure and relationships with

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Strategic objectives of E-business

Defining and communicating an organization’s strategic objectives is a key element of any strategy process model since (1) the strategy definition and implementation elements of strategy must be directed at how best to achieve the objectives, (2) the overall success of e-business strategy will be assessed by comparing actual results against objectives and taking

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Strategy formulation of E-business

In this section the key strategic decisions faced by a management team developing e-business strategy are reviewed. For each of the areas of strategy definition that we cover, managers will want to generate different options, review them and select them as shown in Figure 5.16. We start by considering the sell-side-related aspects of e-business

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Strategy implementation of E-business

Strategy implementation includes all tactics used to achieve strategic objectives. The main tactics and actions required are summarized in Figure 5.20. These actions are described in more detail in the remainder of Part 2 and in Part 3 as indicated in the figure. Chapter 10 focuses on approaches to managing the change associated with

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FOCUS on information systems strategy and e-business strategy

An essential part of any e-business strategy is consideration of how information systems strategy supports change. The importance to e-business success of utilizing information sys­tems to manage information is highlighted by Willcocks and Plant (2000) who found in a study of 58 major corporations in the USA, Europe and Australasia that the leading com­panies

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What is e-procurement?

In this chapter we consider the benefits and risks of e-procurement together with tech­niques that can be used to assess these benefits and risks. We also consider the selection of the different types of e-procurement including the hyped business-to-business marketplaces. The terms ‘purchasing’ and ‘procurement’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but as Kalakota and Robinson

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Drivers of e-procurement

Case Study 7.1 illustrates many of the reasons why many companies are now introducing e-procurement. The primary driver is cost reduction, in this case from an average of £60 per order to £10 per order. In many cases the cost of ordering exceeds the value of the product purchased. In another example, BT’s implementation

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Focus on estimating e-procurement cost

While cost savings are commonly cited as the key benefit of e-procurement, more than half the companies in the Tranmit (1999) survey (54 per cent) did not know the procurement costs of their organization! This suggests that calculating costs is not straightforward, but it is clearly an important part of the cost-justification of introducing

Risks and impacts of e-procurement

The Tranmit (1999) report above indicated that in the UK and throughout Europe, adop­tion of e-procurement is low, with less than a fifth of large companies adopting this technology. It may be possible to explain low adoption through a consideration of the risks and impacts involved with e-procurement. A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of 400 senior

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Implementing e-procurement

Implementing e-procurement has the challenges of change management associated with any information system which are discussed in Chapter 10. If the implementation can mirror existing practices, then it will be most straightforward, but many of the benefits will not be gained and the use of new technology often forces new processes to be considered.

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Focus on electronic B2B marketplaces

As the new millennium dawned there was a proliferation of B2B marketplaces. However, as start-up businesses, many have had difficulty in achieving sustainable business models although we will see there are examples of successful marketplaces in vertical industries such as Elemica (www.elemica.com) within the chemicals industry which we referenced in Case Study 6.1. Perhaps

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The future of e-procurement?

In the future, some suggest that the task of searching for suppliers and products may be taken over by software agents which have defined rules or some degree of intelligence that repli­cates intelligence in humans. An agent is a software program that can perform tasks to assist humans. On the Internet, agents can already

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What is e-marketing?

Internet marketing has been described simply as ‘achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies’ (Chaffey et al., 2009). This succinct definition helps remind us that it is the results delivered by technology that should determine investment in Internet marketing, not the adoption of the technology! These digital technologies include Internet media such as web

E-marketing planning

An e-marketing plan is needed in addition to a broader e-business strategy to detail how the sell-side specific objectives of the e-business strategy will be achieved through marketing activities such as marketing research and marketing communications. Since the e-marketing plan is based on the objectives of the e-business or business strategy there is overlap

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E-marketing Situation analysis

The aim of situation analysis is to understand the current and future environment in which the company operates in order that the strategic objectives are realistic in light of what is happening in the marketplace. Figure 8.5 shows the inputs from situation analysis that inform the e-marketing plan. These mainly refer to a company’s

E-marketing Objective setting

Effective e-marketing plans are based on clearly defined objectives since these will inform the strategies and tactics and help in communicating the strategic aims to the workforce and investors. Strategies are agreed to be most effective when they support specific business objectives. A useful technique to help align strategies and objectives is to present

E-marketing Strategy

The strategy element of an e-marketing plan defines how e-marketing objectives will be achieved. Strategy definition has to be tightly integrated into the e-marketing planning process since e-marketing planning is an iterative process from situation analysis to objec­tive setting to strategy definition (Figure 8.3). Key decisions in strategy definition for e-business were described in

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Focus on characteristics of new-media marketing communications

In this section, we explore the main differences between marketing communications in the traditional media such as TV, print and radio and new digital media such as web sites, inter­active TV and mobile commerce. This section is based on the summary presented in Chaffey (2000). Recognizing the differences between the Internet and other media

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E-marketing Tactics

Marketing tactics to implement strategies and objectives are traditionally based around the elements of the marketing mix. There are other methods for approaching tactics that are detailed in further sections. One approach is to use customer-driven tactics that affect both the design and services provided by an e-commerce site. A further approach to structure

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Dell gets closer to its customers online

Dell is a technology company, offering a broad range of product categories, including desktop computer systems, storage, servers and networking products, mobility products, software and peripherals and services to manage IT infrastructure for large organizations. Dell are the number one supplier of personal computer systems in the United States, and the number two supplier