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2 METHODOLOGY
A questionnaire was chosen to investigate the
research questions. To design the questionnaire a
careful literature review was made with special
attention on the electronic management of product
information.
In order to test the questionnaire some experts in
the area of e-business were contacted to give their
input to the formulation of the questionnaire. The
new version was than applied to another group with
a limited knowledge of information technology to
avoid too technical questions that could make the
questionnaire not understandable to some
respondents.
The final version of the questionnaire was
applied between July and September of 2005 on a
group of 200 companies from the German electronic
consumer goods sector. These companies range from
large organisations with annual revenues of over 500
million euros to smaller organisations with an annual
turnover of less than 10 million euros, deriving from
different positions on the supply chain i.e.
manufacture, wholesale, retail.
The response rate was around 20%, a relative
good quote, if compared with other researches,
which apply the same research methodology. A
reason for this result may be the support of
telephone calls to localise the appropriate managers
and the availability of two mediums to answer the
questionnaire i.e. fax and on-line questionnaire.
3 WHY COMPANIES SHOULD
MOVE TOWARDS ELETRONIC
BUSINESS?
In the traditional world, the purchasing and sales
functions are a work intensive process, where a great
number of employees are involved and often realise
repetitive activities that take time and often do not
require specialized skills.
These intensive and repetitive tasks leave space
for errors, delays and high organisational costs, what
can lead to inefficiencies and managerial problems.
The utilisation of information technology can
improve these processes, while reducing their costs.
A study made by Aberdeen Group (2004) shows that
by the utilisation of e-procurement technology,
companies have on average:
• Reduced off-contract (“maverick”) spending by
64%.
• Reduced prices by 7.3% for spend brought back
onto contract.
• Reduced requisition-to-order cycles by 66%.
• Reduced requisition-to-order costs by 58%.
• Increased total spend under management of
procurement group by 20%. Each new dollar
brought under management can yield 5% to
20% cost reductions.
On the other side of the supply chain, company’s
customers have more and more different
requirements that organisations would have
difficulties to attend properly, in a reasonable time-
frame, when applying the so called traditional tools.
In this scenario, the goal of the information
technology is not restricted just to the improvement
and the cost reduction of the processes, instead it
seeks also to develop and maintain long-term
dependencies and relationships between firms and
their customers. Indeed, it seeks for creating loyalty
among profitable customers of a firm (Fayerman,
2002).
A number of other arguments could be listed to
justify the deployment of information technology to
support business transactions: from the improvement
of the time management that may be applied in other
strategic activities to the management of the
increasing number of channels that organisations use
to communicate with their customers and suppliers.
Nonetheless, because of the deception with the
early adopters results, companies have slowed their
speed of e-business systems deployment. Therefore,
the investment on e-business technologies are done
now only after a precise analysis of company’s
supply chain environment and the readiness of their
buyers and suppliers to engage in electronic
interactions, which (Barua, 2001) refers as one of
the main success factors to e-business initiatives.
The following survey results analyse the
implications of this phenomenon in the German
electronic consumer good industry as well as the
way that those enterprises are facing this relative
new business scenario, where although the deception
with the internet bubble, companies are more and
more required to apply information technology to
effectively and efficiently attend their business
partners.
4 SURVEY RESULTS
This section analyses the information collected at the
research on the state of e-business on the German
electronic consumer goods industry.
In order to get a better understanding of the
companies that participated in the survey, the first
part of the questionnaire has gathered information
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