E Commerce in Supply Chain

E-commerce in Supply Chain

People usually associate e-commerce with just buying and selling of goods or services over the internet, however what they fail to realize is the immense network of integration and collaboration amongst the various stakeholders that perform seamlessly leading the customers to derive this association of simplicity of buying and selling with e-commerce. Company’s relationships with supplier, manufacturers, distributors and other business partners are very critical and integral to the constitution of the supply chain. Thus it can be safely concluded that for one customer facing webpage there are several non-customer facing applications of the supply chain that are running simultaneously.

E commerce involves the execution of transactions over the internet. The primary functions that companies perform who are involved in the supply chain activities are as follows

• Providing Online Catalogue

• Placing & Receiving Orders

• Tracking Orders

• Filling & Delivering Orders

• Paying & Receiving Orders

Companies willing to implementing e-commerce in business in order to increase integration, productivity, cutting costs etc. amongst its stake holders would involve a huge transformation of the above mentioned supply chain activities to its digital form.

The Traditional drivers of Supply Chain

Fig: Primary Drivers of the traditional supply chain.

There are two primary supply chain drivers.

• Logistics

• Cross-functional

Company’s supply chain achieves a perfect fit between responsiveness and efficiency that best matches company strategy.

The objective of implementing e-commerce in the supply chain is to improve the responsiveness and efficiency of the above mentioned drivers all the more.

Impact of E-commerce on current SCM Drivers

Companies have started realizing that efficiency and effective flow of materials and information along the entire supply chain is not only the key to deriving profits in business but also source