Discuss how E-commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees' empowerment and facilitate customer support

There are many benefits created by using e-commerce. Cycle time reduction is one of the benefits of e-commerce. Cycle time is defined as the time is being taken from start to finish producing one unit product or the time it takes to provide a service from beginning through completion. Cycle time can help companies shorten its delivery time. This is how a company worked to serve customers by using of e-commerce. A customer was decided to buy goods and placed an order on the online transaction server. At the same time, the customer is able to check the status of their order within seconds. If we are using traditional manual order entry, it takes a few minutes to complete the task because it needs to go through a few of departments to ensure the quantity of the goods. E-commerce helps to reduce the cycle time by eliminate use of phone, fax or other paper-based ordering processes and all the requisitions and purchase orders are generated and transferred in real time online. Reduction of cycle time can speed up the ordering process.

Employees are the crucial stakeholders in every company. Therefore, it is important to give employees’ empowerment on the business process. Employees’ empowerment means giving employees responsibility and authority to make decisions regarding all aspects of product development. E-commerce can help to improve employees’ empowerment by providing employees greater and easier access to information through intranet. Any updated information or other departments’ information will be viewed by employees. This enable employees to make better decisions for the company. Besides that, online training is also a part of the employees' empowerment. Employees can be trained without taking leave and travelling to the place. It can help to save company's training cost.

Customer is the important element for a company to be success. So that customer services should not be ignored and it should treat as core business of company. E-commerce can help to facilitate customer support by implementing a wide range of technological solutions and communication opportunities. In the past, customers would view the updated products list in the printed catalog sent by seller in a period. Furthermore, customers also placed an order via the phone and wait until the company’s purchasing department processed and shipped the order. Nowadays customers not only can frequently view the updated products through online, the order also can be placed faster in a few of minutes and the product required can be delivered faster to the customer.