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Vol 29 - No 02 - March 2003 Editorial The next thing you knew, along came e-Business, and suddenly there was a call centre taking orders here, an e-Commerce web site selling products there, mobile sales people all over the place submitting customised orders, and even a web site where customers could log on and track the status of their order. According to managing directors, this was an 'e-enabled, customer-centric, multi-channel strategy'. Supply chain managers muttered under their breath that it was more like a recipe for chaos. And in some companies, chaos it was. These were the companies that built up their e-Business 'strategy' at departmental level, with each department buying different IT systems that suited their own idea of what customer relationship management should be, but with little thought as to how this was all going to tie into the back office. So you ended up with web sites that didn't actually link to any other systems, so someone had to print out the orders, and someone else had to key them back in to the back-office ordermanagement system. Page number: 4 Word count: 825 Related Topics: Ecommerce
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