• A series of value-adding activities connecting a company’s supply side with its demand side

• Provides manager with a tool to analyze and redesign their internal and external processes
• improve efficiency and effectiveness

What are the 5 primary activities in value chain

Inbound logistics

                Operations

                Outbound logistics

Marketing and sales

Service

• Considers how the whole production and delivery process can be made more efficient

How do they do this?

• Map every activity
• Then categorizes each activity

Unbundling

• Contributes to more complex e-Business relationships

• e-Business technology has important role to play in creating efficiency through outsourcing

• Network of facilities and distribution options

• Performs the function of procurement and acquisition of material

• Processing and transformation of the material into finished products

• Physical distribution of the finished product to customers

• Looks at processes as sets of interdependent activities designed and structured to produce a specific output for a customer or a market

What is a business process

• Ordering of activities with a beginning and an end

• Has inputs and a specified output

• Can be measured

• cost, quality, time and customer satisfaction

• Defines the results to be achieved

• Relationships between activities

• Interactions with other processes and resources

Know characteristics of a business process

• Environment

• Customer and initiated by a customer order

• Processing

• Communication

• Inventories or queues

• Decision points

• Delivery of a product

Know workflow

• Workflows where information processing supports a physical process

• Workflows where information processing is the process itself

• The degree of repetition and the level of expertise or knowledge required to execute the process

• The level of anticipation of the stimulus that triggers the process.

Types of ebusiness relationships

• Network of computers connected together globally

• any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet

• Web or WWW

  • Documents linked together over the Internet

  • Web uses protocols spoken over the Internet, to transmit data

  • Web pages are viewed through Web browsers

Know difference between internet and web

- internet is a network that uses tcp/IP to travel  and the web that requires a browser to view and needs http/https are the rules on viewing

Know client servers

• Server computer, functions as the "brains" of the organization

  • a large-capacity computer, perhaps even a mainframe, with a large amount of data and functionality stored on it

• Client computers, which are commonly called workstations.

  • smaller computers that employees use to perform their computer-based responsibilities

• Clients and Servers communicate over a network

• Clients initiate communication and server responds

• Servers commonly contain data files and applications that can be accessed across the network

• An employee who wants to access company-wide data files would use his or her client computer to access the data files on the server

Web based technologies and applications

• an application that is accessed over a network popular due to the convenience of using a web browser as a client

  • Netscape /Internet Explorer

• ability to update and maintain web applications without distributing and installing software on thousands of client computers

• Common web applications include webmail, online retail sales, online auctions, wikis and many other functions

What are Collaborative technologies

• Workflow Management

  • management of business processes with information technology

  • automates a business process where documents, information, or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action

  • comprises a number of logical steps (activities)

  • depicts various aspects of a business process

• EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)

  • Standard format for exchanging data between businesses

• used to transfer electronic documents or business data from one computer system to another computer system,

• A network for transmitting standard transactions

• A paperless trading environment

Def of e-market

• An e-Market can be defined as a virtual online market,

  • a network of company interactions and relationships,

  • buyers, suppliers, distributors, and sellers find and exchange information, conduct trade and collaborate with each other

  • content from multiple suppliers, trading exchanges, and member communications

  • supported by collaboration tools

What are the applications used by a participant on an emarket

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Electronic Procurement

• Vertical e-markets:

                  Industry specific; dealing with specialized goods and services.

• Horizontal e-markets

                  A product focus instead of a industry focus (MRO goods.

How do emarkets differ from traditional markets

• Personalization and customization

• Information goods

• Search

• Transaction mechanisms

• Price discovery

• Facilitation

• e-Payment systems

Classification based on Ownership Models

• Buyer-dominated marketplace

  •  Many-to-one: Set up by large buyers together with technology partners

• Supplier-dominated marketplace

  • One –to-many: Set up by (one or a few) large sellers

• Neutral marketplace

  • Many-to-many via an on-line marketplace

Market structure and efficiency

• Cost reduction

• Network externalities

• Switching costs

• Economies of scale and scope

• Technological uncertainty

Content Related Success factors

• Stakeholder Motives

  • Willingness of key stakeholders to join market is a serious threat

• Products traded:

  • Complexity of product description

  • items with simple product descriptions are more suitable for e-markets

Process related success factors

• Functionality and support

• Learning costs

• Trust

• Quality of information

• Information security

• Geographic location

• Partnerships