‘Ensure a strong back-end integration of processes’

The second day of the Nasscom conference on E-biz 2001 focussed on some of

the key strategies that are essential to become global players in the e-commerce

market. A panel discussion on "B2B: Back to Basics" urged enterprises

to clearly define their top and bottom line models and to have strong back-end

integration before venturing to e-enabling. SAP India Ltd. director, E-commerce,

D.V. Jagadish, addressing the session suggested enterprises to evaluate their

ERP and e-business parameters and quoted a Gartner Report which said that ERP2

was an extension of e-business. "A good strategic and decision support

system, and adoptability is the need of the hour," he added.

Sai Info Ltd. COO Pramila Rajput said that for an enterprise

to be successful, one has to re-engineer internal processes as well as business

and technology processes. While it was true that technology was the enabler,

enterprises have to ponder on offering a core value proposition to their

customers and competent value added services. Continuing she said, "The

role of collaborative commerce in the new digital workplace scenario cannot be

ignored. In the changing business model scenario, speed in transactions and

reduction in cost factors are the biggest drivers in e-com market and we can see

the inherent advantage of C-commerce such as formation of many-many network,

coming together of buyers and sellers under a singe platform with a industry

wise standards." She referred to some of the highly successful enterprises

such as Wal-mart, Cisco and Dell who moved their business focus with a more

customer centric approach.

Another panelist, Commerce One (India) COO Vivek Agarwal,

spoke on the role of collaborative procurement and distribution as a new path to

enterprise value. He opined that lack of info on enterprise requirement needs

and problem area lies in the procurement and distribution process. He suggested

that enterprises need to address some of the key issues as, usually

organizations will have multiple ERPs or no ERP vendors and neither of them with

strong e-procurement applications. Apart from that majority of the

functionalities of the enterprises were distributed across geographically For

that one needs to leverage the existing ERP systems and other legacy system and

applications. There is a strong need to bring together disparate business units

together and work seamlessly. The panelists were of the opinion to integrate the

collaborative solutions with e-marketplace model to enable partnering with all

value chain partners.