ERP and Electronic Commerce Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

ERP and Electronic Commerce - Essay Example In the past, business entities concentrated more on fetching benefits through supply of standardized products to a stable and wide consumer markets. The role technology involved here was to optimize the well defined, discretely functioning areas within the enterprise. This was limited to the development and maintenance of individual software aimed at automating certain business activities. However the expansion of the realms of business made entities to indulge in varied range of activities. The scope of ecommerce in fact widened the variety in the business activities Curran A, T. Ladd A (2006, p.17-18). With reference to these developments, for the companies to respond better to the market demands, they have to adopt a business process orientation and a global supply chain perspective. The essential prerequisite for the optimization of varied activities involved in modern business scenarios like e-commerce is the integration of information system. This would allow the clear cut exploration of the possible value additions within the company and would aid the design of business process that would minimize cost and maximize the profits. However this process of integration of the multitude of business activities involved a number of challenges. These challenges made the business engineers think of the possibility of a single database clustering the data from different departments within itself and providing a tailor made query system. This resulted in the development of Enterprise Resource Planning systems and it gradually evolved and expanded to serve as a single window solution for business data and process management. It served as a single interface for data entry for people involved in the company, despite the variation in department or geographic position. The da ta entry was to be made only once making the whole