Changing The Establishment

Changing an established business practice can be a challenge for any organisation. When the practice in question is the trading relationship between that enterprise, its suppliers and its customers, the challenge increases by an order of magnitude. As a vehicle for trade which provides all of those involved with real-time information and a basis for dynamic decision-making, electronic commerce has the ability to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency at each stage of the business process. Implemented correctly, it has the potential for changing radically the way in which business is conducted.

Sceptics point to the fact that there is nothing new about businesses trading without recourse to conventional paper documentation: the practice has been well-established for more than a decade through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), but the take-up has been limited for much of that time. They argue that if the concept had so much to commend it, there would surely be few