Strategy and application

The second part of the book was quite interesting as it’s highlighted the following topics, E-business strategy, supply chain management, E-procurement and E-marketing. To start with, we all know that organizations in all its different types and size have to define a strategy in order to structure the future directions & actions toward specific goals. However, organizations nowadays have a high speed of development as a result of adapting different types of technology. In order to develop a successful e-business strategy we must have a framework that has fore stages as the lecturer indicated, strategic evaluation, strategic objective, strategy definition and strategy implementation, these fore elements have to be structured in a way that fit all different goals for each department within a business to achieve the main objective. Another important aspect in e-business is we have to define organization e-business strategy according to business unit, regional or functional. Also the lecturer highlighted the important of integrated electronic channels with the existing channels which will create more efficiency. Finally, the most important point that we discuss during the class is that, e-business strategy is became a requirement in all types of today businesses, e-business strategy most reflect the main goal for the organization and that by integrating the electronic strategy with the existing strategy.

Moving to second topic in my evaluation for this part supply chain management, this topic was quit new to me as I didn’t study supply chain management unit yet, so I get an insight idea about what is supply chain management is. I know that each product have to go through a certain process, starting from the first step which is  manufacturers to retailer than logistic to suppliers after that to distributor and finally  ending on costumer hand .

    However, dealing with supply  chain management process wasn't that easy , ones we know about all technical issues behind those processes, and the element that beyond the organization such as dealing with different regulations within one country or internationally, the optimization of material flows and associated information flows involved with an organization operations. The group exercise that we did in the class shows a different level of understanding among supply chain process for a product also the exercise shows how is this process could be complicated if it get the wrong direction.

We started E-procurement topic with the debate, where one team was supporting the idea of adapting a new technology within an organization to help employees to facilitate their duties and to promote a good services for their customers.  On the other hand, against team was trying to show the downside of E- procurement if the organization used the wrong types of technology. However, I didn't convince by any team as the discussion took another direction.  In the end of the discussion E-procurement refer to all activates involved with obtaining items, request, authorization, ordering, delivering and payment between the suppliers and the purchasers.

As e-procurement goes through different stages within an organization benefit and risk are directly associated with each stage, also e-procurement have five rights of purchasing which are get the product at the right price, deliver the product at the right time, get a product with high quality and the right quantity finally purchasing from the right source, we had an interesting exercise in the class when we go through the key procurement activities within an organization with highlighting the cost on time and money on each stage, and how organization could implement a model that helps to provide the five purchasing right in an efficient way. Then the lecture illustrate some facts  about the internet effect on procurement  an example for that is using email to communicate between  different department rather than using box mail or the need of having someone to transfer files to each department which have a direct impact on time consumption and logistic cost like paper consumption. Another exercise that interested me when we used our smart phone to dialled number 52155 which a services provided by PollEverwhere.com aimed of the exercise is to analyse the degree of student participation on the class.

E-marketing is my favourite topic as I did my debate on this chapter, I wasn’t quite unsure at the beginning about the differences between E-marketing, E-business and E-commerce. However, after we did an intensive reading about e-marketing during the class exercises or with my group, I realise that e-marketing is a subsection of e-commerce, which all comes under e-business umbrella. Coming to debate part, our group consist of four members, we nominated our group in the second week and we started preparing for the debate by, first having a meeting on the second week amid to understand the debate statement, on the third week we decided the role for each members and which points should we cover to rebuttal the against team. We had a cooperative team work where each member was trying to enhance the quality of our view about the topic also supporting each other point, in the end of our debate, despite of the final vote which supported the against team, working effectively with the team was the main goal of the debate, as its prepare the student to be a part of a teamwork in a real life situations, enhancing their ability to voice their voice when they face dilemmas or they have to take a serious decision in real businesses.