E-Business Components

E-business involves several major components: [2] business intelligence (BI), customer

relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource

planning (ERP), e-commerce, conducting electronic transactions within the firm, collaboration,

and online activities among businesses.

Business intelligence is about the activities that a small business may undertake to collect, store,

access, and analyze information about its market or competition to help with decision making.

When conducted online, BI is efficient and quick, helping companies to identify noteworthy

trends and make better decisions faster. BI has been described as “the crystal ball of the 21st

century.” [3]

“Your Business Idea: The Quest for Value”, customer relationship management (CRM) refers to “…a customer service approach that

focuses on building long-term and sustainable customer relationships that add value for the

customer and the company.”[4] It is a company-wide strategy that brings together information

from all data sources within an organization (and sometimes from external data sources) to give

one holistic view of each customer in real time. The goal is to reduce costs and increase

profitability while providing customer satisfaction. [5] CRM applications are available for even

the smallest businesses.

Every small business has a supply chain, the network of vendors that provide the raw

components that are needed to make a product or deliver a service. The management of this

network is known as supply chain management (SCM). SCM is about efficiently and effectively

improving the way that a company finds those raw components and then delivers the product or

the service to the customer. [6] SCM applications are now available for small businesses.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP), “Foundations for Small

Business”, is about integrating all departments and functions across a company (sales,

marketing, human resources, finance, accounting, production, engineering, etc.) into a single

computer system that can serve the particular needs of each department. The objective is to

provide information quickly and efficiently to those who need it. Small businesses have many

vendor choices for ERP systems. There are more than thirty vendors in the field, and they are

looking to small and midsize businesses as their primary growth market.