Supporting Business Processes in E-Commerce Sites

By DoItYourself.com Staff

Whether business processes will be established for the first time with your website, or whether they are already in place, your website has a responsibility beyond just helping customers purchase products and services. It must also support the business professionals who run your company and whose job it is to make the website successful. Thus, your website design plan must take their needs and requirements into consideration.

Making Business Processes Your Priority

Business processes make businesses run, and the employees of a business understand these processes the best. Too often e-commerce companies and e-commerce divisions of traditional companies ignore or downplay this basic fact. The result is a robust website that makes customers happy, but requires extensive and unreasonable efforts for the employees of the company to do their jobs of actually running the business.

An example: One company was a brick-and-mortar retailer with a reasonably successful mail-order division. The mail-order division had three employees who took orders over the phone and entered them into the company's AS/400. Because the AS/400 was already used for managing the company's distribution center, the system already contained inventory information and other important data. Every day, one of the mail-order employees would go into the distribution center and pack up all of the day's orders, typically a couple dozen for shipping.

When the company set up its first website and decided to accept online orders, management determined it made sense to have the mail-order division handle online orders as well. Unfortunately, that's where the planning phase stopped. The website was hosted off-site, and there was no integration between its database and the AS/400. Instead, the website wrote orders to a text file, which was then sent via FTP to the manager of the mail-order division. Each order was manually entered into the AS/400 - just as if it had been called in.

When the online order volume rose to several dozen orders per day, an extra staff member was hired to input the online orders into the AS/400. When the volume rose to a couple hundred orders per day, the management team realized that the manual effort wasn't sufficient and that some type of integration was required. Because the website continued to amass an overwhelming number of orders each day, the integration had to be performed quickly without taking the website offline - precluding the possibility of a thorough integration.

The Obvious Result

In this situation, the existing business processes were in no condition to handle the volume of orders that the website was capable of bringing in. There was almost no automation in the mail-order division, and the burden of the website's order volume clearly indicated that the entire process would have to be redesigned.

The Way Out

Don't feel ashamed if you realize that your company needs to redesign its business processes. The real shame comes from not anticipating the problem or planning for it to begin with. It's never too early, or too late, to include your company's business professionals in the design of your site.

© Doityourself.com 2006