Discuss how E-Commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitate customer support.

REDUCING CYCLE TIME

What is cycle time?It defined as the total time that it takes to complete a recurring task—usually one essential to the business's output.E-Commerce can reduce the cycle time by eliminates the traditional purchase approach, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive.Eliminating steps in business process and take a shorter time to complete a business transaction. E-commerce allows people to carry out businesses without the barriers of time or distance. The process of middle man and intermediaries will be eliminated and the suppliers or producers of certain products can send products directly to customers. By this, the company can reduce unnecessary cost and gain competitive advantages towards other companies. For example Dell and FED-EX.

IMPROVES EMPLOYEES' EMPOWERMENT


Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one's own destiny.E-commerce can improve employees’ empowerment by allowing the decentralization of decision making and authority via collaborative commerce. It grants power to employees in dealing with process of capturing, researching and leveraging business information. Employee empowerment divided into 3 levels. The first level is encouraging. It encourages employees to play more active roles in their work. Second level is involving which gives employees responsibility for improving the way that things are done. Third level is the enabling the employees bigger decisions making power without referring to seniors or managers. As a result, it will benefit organization in term of getting closer to customers, improving service quality, innovating continuously, increasing productivity and gaining the competitive edge.



Facilitate customer support


E-commerce also facilitates customer support by providing a wide range of technological solutions and communication opportunity.Besides, it can provide unlimited shopping hours for customers to place their order as it is run on a 24 hours basis.It also provides electronic bulletin for customer in order to report fault and dissatisfaction. Customer has direct access to product information updates, and other promotion by visiting the online stores. Through online, it creates an interactive and more easier way for customer to buy the products that they need compared to the traditional stores.