But How?
PropertyLook’s Web site is a great example of improving the customer experience—providing content-rich, customer-facilitated functionality—something that Fujitsu’s Martin North says is one of the three domains where a business can pursue ecommerce, depending, of course, on the nature of the business. And the customer experience is perhaps the key area where, in the past, Web sites were lacking. At the forefront of businesses revisiting ecommerce is a drive to make the Web site something more that a brochure for the organisation.
Business might also choose to concentrate their efforts internally in the organization-the second domain. North says, “This is about leveraging the info that you have in the organisation and drawing insight from it and being able to spray it back out to the points of interaction with customers or the point of decision making inside the organisation—this whole issue of business intelligence. The next wave of ebusiness is around making sure that you’re leveraging the information you have in your organisation and creating real opportunity.”
The third domain, according to North, can come from driving back into the supply chain to work with suppliers towards supply chain optimisation and rationalisation. “It’s real cycle procurement, helping you to manage your inventory better, have quicker turn around and greater efficiency,” he says. Arnold agrees. “It’s what’s called the glass pipeline,” he says. He sees the big benefits of ecommerce coming from the logistics end-being able to do ordering, tracking, invoicing-the whole supply process-and maintain visibility and control over it.
“There are lots of different options for organisations: do I focus on the customer experience, do I focus internally, or do I focus on the supply chain?”
-Martin North, Fujitsu
But Arnold points out that for many businesses the thinking might need to begin closer to Earth. Before this level of restructuring is really viable there are plenty of more fundamental elements that should be addressed. “If you look long term and strip out the hype, overall people are find that there are no silver bullets. The challenge facing businesses really is aspiring to best practice. Everything from making sure that your site is usable, making sure that your site actually has content or services that are appropriate to you customers, right through to managing your e-mail properly. It might sound trivial but I think it really is an issue for Australian businesses.”
The risk and the possibilities
The real challenge for companies looking to take the big (daunting) steps will be to work out where to invest these technologies and how to actually transform the business to leverage against them. Ultimately the difficult part is not really the technology but changing the processes of the organisation and the culture of the organisation. Dell is the classic example of what can be achieved, says North. “Dell changed the paradigm around building computers. What you now have is a self-configuration Web site, and what it does is take out this whole idea of keeping inventory because effectively they build in line with orders. That fundamental shift in terms of the computer construction has tipped the balance—Dell got a start. Rather than holding inventory and waiting for people to come and buy it, what Dell did is take the order and then order the parts and then put it together and turn it around in a real-time. It’s a real-time procurement cycle that is driving off the back of the order.”
“The key thing that Dell did was to say ‘that’s wasted capital sitting there in inventory, we won’t have inventory anymore, in fact we’ll have inventory through our suppliers and well have a real-time network that allows us to pull the components together to be able to deliver the computer’.” What faces businesses looking to emulate the likes of Dell—revolutionising the way they structure their business—is clearly intimidating.
