E-Business

E-Business is about much more than just selling products on-line – it’s about using the Internet to make you and your business more efficient.

If you imagine e-Business as just on-line shopping (e-Commerce), it’s very easy for composites companies, especially small ones, to dismiss the idea as irrelevant. However, e-Business is much deeper than that and, if implemented well, will almost certainly increase your efficiency and save you money. The problem seems to be that for many small companies, e-Business has become an intimidating idea – one that only the "big" companies could engage in – and media hype and marketing hasn’t helped this.

Perhaps you've also thought to yourself that e-Business is only for those companies who have something to sell over the Internet. It’s not. E-Business can be as simple as improving your recruiting practices via electronic job postings, giving you access to a wider pool of potential candidates, saving you money over traditional advertising media, and allowing possible recruits to respond in a more immediate way. By adopting such a simple practice, you've adopted a facet of e-business and improved your returns.

We can break down the adoption of e-Business to make it more manageable, and the 5 steps below are suggested simple stages. However, it is not meant to be a definitive guide to the order in which you should do things, as some of the steps may well be more relevant to particular types of company. Feel free to pick and choose. In reading through these steps, and the examples, it’s worth bearing in mind that this has been written by a small company in the composites supply chain, not by anyone out to sell you hardware, software or “e-Business solutions”. It’s therefore offers a simple and practical approach.

Gordon Bishop, NetComposites. First Published in Reinforced Plastics