Electronic Commerce at Air Products

Linking all the business processes and transactions to ensure effective electronic commerce over the Internet is a challenging task.To achieve a successful e-commerce deployment, every department of the organization must work in agreement. From marketing to operations to IT and finance, each functional area has to commit in the implementation to realize the benefits of the new platform. We need a cross-functional team approach consisting of business people who can correctly identify business requirements, technology requirements and success criteria. With e-business, the benefits come not just from speeding up and automating a company’s own internal processes but from its ability to spread the efficiency gains to the business systems of its suppliers and customers. The ability to collaborate with customers and vendors may be just as much of a competitive advantage as the ability to deploy the technology. Certainly the technology matters, but getting the business strategy right matters even more. And that may mean not just re-engineering your company, but reinventing it. Integration:To be an effective service and distribution channel, and for seamless information flow, e-commerce website must be integrated with back-end legacy systems, call centers, marketing initiatives, pricing, customer data storage, inventory count, communication and fulfillment, transaction handling and payment provider among many other areas. We need a team to enable selection of appropriate technologies, identification of acceptable tradeoffs and articulate the strategic value of certain integration choices and conflicts in priorities. Security and Information Protection:It is critical that the development team be both proactive and reactive in handling security threats.Security features that provide authentication, encryption,authorization to maintain confidentiality and integrity, and protect information form unauthorized use are critical for making the customer comfortable and for building...