E-Commerce In Corporate Operation--Case Analysis Of ABB

The scale level of U.S. e-commerce in manufacturing shipments has been touching stably on the amount of USD 7,000 billions since 1998; this level was still stable even though the whole cyber economy in the world experienced a terrible disaster in 2000. Actural results show that e-commerce really brings to global manufacturers considerable benefits. Therefore, the study of how global leading manufacturing giants do e-commerce will definitely help us understand their application characters and provide sound suggestions for other manufacturing companies which will intend to apply e-business. As one of traditional manufacturers and an equipment provider which dedicates to automation and power technology, ABB has established a set of effective e-commerce strategies on the basis of its long-term general strategy and such corporate characters as multinational operation, professional and multicultural nature. This paper primarily stresses how e-commerce, issued by ABB's global business units, impacts deeply on such activities as procurement, communication and marketing, and evaluate the positive effects with a perspective of the corporate basic value chain. This paper begins with the introduction about the background and e-commerce strategy of ABB. In the second part, it emphasizes to analyze the latest development tendency of e-commerce in the manufacturing field, and in order to have a more general understanding toward manufacturing e-commerce the author selects several multinational companies which have similar features with ABB to analyze their e-commerce applications comparing with each other. From the third to the fifth parts, the author states in details ABB's e-commerce applications which involve such links on the value chain as procurement, sales and marketing and inner communication as well. Apart from the introduction about every e-commerce application, the paper states the actural benefits what e-commerce brings to ABB and also provides more deep analyses to identify the reason why these e-commerce applications lead to such benefits. The third part provides the analysis which helps conclude that the complete shift from original separate procurement model to e-procurement leads to the result--cost saving and process simplifying. In the fourth part, the author tries to analyze the reason why e-communication tools can improve the general exchange performance of ABB with a perspective upon the communication principle in organization. And the fifth part introduces main functions of ABB global website and their effects. It substantiates that cyber marketing has become one of the prime ways among all of corporate marketing tools.The paper finally concludes that e-commerce applications of ABB in such aspects as procurement, marketing and communication, sufficiently reflect its implementation strategy in terms of e-commerce. Some of these applications might be instructively significant for other manufacturing companies.