Primus Securities E-Business Simulation

Business, E-Commerce/Internet

Year 1

Questions on B2E websites on employee access to policies, ethical, etc.

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Solution

This issue deals with e-business, e-business is a strategy, which uses technology to achieve business goals. It is basically an evolution in the way companies interact. It provides information to facilitate delivery of goods and services and supports change initiatives and reinforces business process reengineering. It improves external business relationship also.

Types of business on net

There are two types of companies that do business on the Internet. One type of company is that which exists solely on the Internet. These types of companies do not have stores or do business in the traditional way. Two notable examples of this type are Amazon.com and CdNow.com. The other type of company that uses e-commerce is one that uses the Internet to complement their existing business.

B2E website is used to increase operational efficiency by providing employees access to policies, procedures, benefits through Intranets.

B2E is business-to-employee, an approach in which the focus of business is the employee, rather than the consumer (as it is in business-to-consumer, or B2C) or other businesses (as it is in business-to-business, or B2B). The B2E approach grew out of the ongoing shortage of information technology (IT) workers.

The B2E portal is designed to include not only everything that an employee might hope to find on an intranet (such as a corporate directory, or customer support information), but also any personal information and links that the employee might want (such as stocks information, or even games). The intention is to increase not only efficiency, but also employee satisfaction and a sense of community within the organization.

A B2E portal has three distinguishing characteristics:

* A single point of entry: one URL for everyone within an organization.

* A mixture of organization-specific and employee-defined components.

* The potential to be highly customized and easily altered to suit the particular employee.

It leads to a smaller, leaner staffs with a greater focus on marketing. It helps in transparent communications through the intranet and internet.

Moreover the employees can have personalised feedback and interaction with the topmanagement. It reduces the gap in the organisation, fosters creativity& innovation. It also reduces the cost of operations.

For e.g In Ebanking, occupancy costs that are 80% lower than for a traditional bank. A multimedia bank can operate well within a few hundred sq. feet area.

Thus eBusiness is also helping to force out distribution inefficiencies by removing the traditional barriers to commerce; time, distance and physical location. Connectivity of employees to company intranets, extranets and to the Internet, coupled with the current integration of daily operations, is taking ease of communication and work product to new levels.

Another Example:

Corporate Portals brings to Ford the following features and benefits to the modern organization:

Integration - the world's largest portal, hub.ford.com, spans 800 Ford facilities and 150 manufacturing plants worldwide. It integrates the hundreds of thousands of web pages into one enterprise-wide web destination. The portal brings together more than one million documents on Ford networks and the Internet in a single, searchable directory of links to files, web pages and reports. Ford employees can draw on a common base of best practices, market news, product specifications, performance metrics, and policy and procedures for the information they need to make confident business decisions and act quickly on revenue opportunities, with no geographical restrictions.

Personalization -Each user can tailor his or her portal experience to his or her role by choosing from a menu of options. To assemble a complete view of the business, Ford employees can select options including e-mail, real-time news feeds, stock reports, sales histories, personnel directories, self-service travel booking, corporate expense reporting, and pay and benefits,