How E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support

Reduce cycle time
E-commerce has brought many benefits in our daily life especially for companies which include reduce cycle time, improve empowerment of employees, and facilitate customer support and others. The cycle time may reduce if e-commerce takes place in business. Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a process, which is any process, for example are purchase order process and transferring of purchase order to invoice. With this reduction of cycle time, the customer can receive products ordered in a faster time. E-commerce can reduce this cycle time by eliminating the time taken to process between supplier, intermediaries and customers, which means when a customer placing an order, he or she is directly deal with the supplier website, hence it eliminate the processing time between the intermediaries and supplier. E-commerce provides a 24 hours platform for transaction instead of staying at shop for a long time. The working time of administration can be lowered by performing business transactions through automatic system. Those transactions can be recorded automatically by well-designed e-commerce system. Besides, the product’s promotion time will also be reduced by posting advertisement on website.

Improve employees’ empowerment
E-commerce can also improve in employees’ skills. In some B2B websites, login IDs can be provided to authorized people for instance the machineries service engineers from around the world. The B2B sites, can allow the service engineers to share the common found problems and at the same time compile the knowledge base. Ultimately by having the service engineers patronizing the sites shall improve the on-job knowledge. Some B2B sites allows forum for sharing knowledge. With the forum shared among the employees, it allows the employee to participate thus improve their job satisfactions and performances. As mentioned previously job efficiency can be improved by reducing the cycle time. This shall improve the overall employees’ performance as well.

Facilitate customer support
The Internet has become the primary and often times the only place for people to research. Their demand for immediate satisfaction is only matched by their need for accurate information. By publishing an online catalog no longer satisfies the needs of an online customer and could very well spell disaster for any e-business looking to capitalize on their Web presence. E-businesses are better equipped to provide the level of interaction that many Web customers demand. It is enable users to maintain their own customized and editable shopping lists for routine purchases. These shopping lists were encouraging repeat purchases as customers do not have to find all over again the same items that they bought last time. Apart from that, the shopping list was enable each user to create multiple shopping lists, create a shopping list at any point in the shopping process, link to the product description page of each product in the shopping list and edit each shopping list to place a current order or updating which items they want and the quantity desired of each item. For registered customers it can provide an option that allows saving and viewing their order history. For example, customer may want information about items they have bought in the past to help them select complementary items, or to remind them what size they need. Access to this information can increase customers’ comfort and thereby encourage further purchases

Related Link
http://www.remarkable.co.nz/ebusiness/ebusiness_cost_benefit.htm
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080324/0378211.html