Lakhasly

e-Business and ERP
Both e-Business and ERP technologies have pretty much evolved simultaneously, since the 1990s.
Hence, during the early days, many people thought only one would survive for the long term. With
the initial enthusiasm and support for e-Business, many analysts predicted the doom of ERP. Instead,
both have flourished beyond everyone’s expectation from those early days. One reason for their
success is this simultaneous growth. The early predictions were based on the assumptions that these
two technologies were competing for the same market. Yes, there are some similarities between the
two, namely, both provide platform for systems integration or data sharing. While e-Business
systems are better for sharing unstructured data and collaboration, ERP are better for sharing
structured or transaction data; also, e-Business focus was on external integration
(interorganizational), while ERP systems’ initial focus was on internal data integration. Therefore, eBusinessand ERP are more of complementary technologies (see Figure 1-8) rather than competing
technologies as predicted earlier. Norris et al. provide the following major reasons4
forthis.

1. e-Business technology focus has been on linking a company with its external partners and
   stakeholders, whereas ERP focus has been on integrating the functional silos of an organization into
   an enterprise application. e-Business technologies that have emerged as successful over the decade
   (e.g., business-to-consumer and business-to-business) have generally focused on market growth by
   selling products and services to new consumers and markets. On the other hand, ERP technology
   has been successful in integrating business processes across the functional spectrum of the
   organization and in providing a central repository of all corporate data, information, and
   knowledge, thereby increasing organizational efficiency and worker productivity.


2. e-Business is a disruptive technology, whereas ERP is adaptive technology. e-Business practically
   transformed the way business operates in terms of buying and selling, customer service, and its
   relationships with suppliers. This caused a lot of disruptions in organizational strategy, structure,
   power, and the like. ERP has emerged as an adapter by merging the early data processing and
   integration efforts within a large corporation. It has been very successful in aligning and
   integrating accounting, finance, human resource, and manufacturing technologies by aligning
   business processes with information processing logic and in transforming these organizations
   from pure hierarchical structures to matrix and other hybrid or flexible organizational structures.
   Thus, even though e-Business caused a lot of disruptions in business, ERP helped these businesses
   survive by allowing them to adapt quickly to these disruptions.