Applying e-business in fast moving consumer goods (fmcg) wholesale enterprises in Palestine

Abstract

The electronic business (e-business) includes activities, which besides the intensive use of information and especially internet technology, connect and 'digitalize' all business activities, from developments and production, to management and administration. E-business is more than just another way to sustain or improve existing business practices. This thesis investigates Applying EBusiness in fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) wholesale enterprises in Palestine. It proposes an instrument to measure the strength of a company's organizational and Information and communication Technology (ICT) capabilities to make this transformation. After defining e-business and explaining why an evolutionary aspect of moving to ebusiness is required, the dimensions of e-business are defined with respect to differences between traditional business, partial, or pure e-business. Also, a model for moving to e-business is illustrated. The e-business evolving model is divided into six stages and represents an evolutionary aspect of migrating to e-business. The majority of the literature on the subject of e-business focuses on the definition of the components of e-business in this thesis e-business is composed of five elements: business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, e-commerce, and supply chain management. It also focuses on methodology of applying e-business, on information systems strategies, to help companies be more effective in their sector or industry. There is very little literature that focuses on some fundamental issues: the Business-to-Business (B2B) market places and the disruptive organizational change that is needed to make a successful transformation. III There is a part of literature on the subject of organizational change. This thesis applies these principles in the context of applying e-business in FMCG wholesale enterprises in Palestine. The capturing of the primary data was conducted through the researcher's personal experience, personal interviews and survey, which is a triangulation approach (quantitative and qualitative). The questionnaire was sent to a sample of 40 Palestinian companies selected from the directory of the Palestinian companies which were ranked according to their economic activities, geographical distribution, ICT infrastructure availability and which were most likely to be able to provide coverage of distribution in the West Bank. Finally, the results of the research study on current practices in evolving e-business in the most successful FMCG wholesale enterprises in Palestine are given. In this research, some aspects of business process innovation and e-business usage have been investigated (general e-business issues with levels of e-business usage, key objectives of participating in e-business, alignment of business strategy with e-business initiatives, e-business impact on the organization and e-business special usage software). Companies in the sector use e-business mainly to improve their internal processes and procedures. The technologies most commonly used by small and large enterprises alike are e-mail, websites; these are followed, at a considerable distance in terms of diffusion, by EDI, data file exchange through email (though very few smaller businesses use these). The most advanced technologies, such as CRM, SCM systems, and Knowledge Management solutions, are still rare and are used only by larger enterprises. ERP systems are the most apparent to be the common factor shared by all companies surveyed