Electronic Commerce and Supply Chain Management at ‘The Swatch Group’

Electronic commerce (EC) and supply chain management (SCM) are two Business Networking strategies that are enjoying widespread popularity. As mentioned in Chapter 4 both are concepts designed to sustain networking among businesses and as such are attracting considerable management attention these days. This is explained by the substantial growth in electronic sales that is expected to take place in the coming years. According to [Forrester 1998] five percent of all global sales will be through electronic media by 2003. While EC is often put on a level with such sales solutions as electronic catalogs, malls and auctions, all sales involve supply chain activities as well. The latter cover the entire production process from procurement to distribution and for some products at least have reached a remarkable degree of sophistication. Examples are immaterial products (e.g. news, and software) as well as some physical products such as CDs, books or computers. Compared to the potential of physical products, electronic sales are still negligible. Prominent exceptions such as Dell or Cisco have had a measure of success due to their efficient link to EC and supply chain solutions. But for many companies this still remains an intricate task. Reasons for that are: Solutions for EC and SCM have evolved from different backgrounds: The former from sales and marketing and the latter from physical logistics, production and materials management.Companies are faced with the trade-off problem to quick develop an EC solution to be present on the market and to integrate transaction data in the backend systems which is a time-consuming and expensive task (cf. Chap. 17).