E-business and Organizational Efficiency

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One approach to help you with an assignment like this one is to provide information from various sources, which you can draw on for your final copy. This is the approach this response takes.

Let's take a closer look at one aspect of e-business, CRM.

RESPONSE:

Knowledge management is essential in a customer-focused market and e-business is one way to facilitate the managing of an organization's intellectual and social capital to meet its e-business objectives. However, research suggests that an organization needs a well-designed knowledge management infrastructure to create and maintain the e-business knowledge required to improve back-office efficiency, customer intimacy and efficiency of coordination with business partners (Lee, Lee & Ling, 2007). A number of 'drivers' stimulate e-business, such as technology, customer services, competition and resource efficiency. Demands may be made by customers, creating marketing imperative, i.e. 'the customer wants it, so it must be done', with a focus on customer convenience in terms of location, time (extended hours, up to and including 24/7 services), and life-style (Clarke, 2000). One aspect of e-business is customer relationship management. A customer-centric e-business model for an efficient customer relationship management can increase organizational efficiency (Saha, 2001).

When organizations use e-business initiatives such as CRM (customer relationship management), the application can help and organization manage customer relationships in an organized way. In fact, today's busy consumer expects a heightened level of customer service, which is resulted in a rapidly changing CRM landscape where the traditional sales-centric use of CRM solutions will be supplemented by a number of disparate data sources containing consumer information. "The ability to customize the core CRM solution affords businesses the opportunity to directly weave their unique business processes with third party data sources. In doing so, companies enable sales representatives to have access to more than just the contact information of a current client or prospect" (CRM Customization Initiatives Improve Key Sales and Customer Metrics).

For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth. http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213567,00.html

Saha (2001), for instance, presented a business model using the electronic media for world commerce to improve business efficiency and customer relationship management (CRM) in the semiconductor industry. The proposed e-business model consists of five basic building blocks integrated into an e-business system to increase organizational efficiency. These building blocks are: (1) an electronic storefront called e-Store; (2) an automatic order management system; (3) an automatic scheduling system; (4) a product customization process; and (5) a networked core business functions as a customer support and feedback team. In order to implement the proposed customer-centric e-business model suitable digital strategies must be adopted. These strategies include organizing a deployment team to setup a target electronic commerce infrastructure. The potential benefits of the proposed e-business model for SDMs are discussed. The benefits include a reduction in the cost and cycle time of business transactions and improvement in customer satisfaction and CRM. The proposed model is shown to improve the marketing strategy by designing an ...