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Focus of B-to-B e-commerce initiatives and related benefits in manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises

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Abstract

Empirical research into business-to-business e-commerce issues involving manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is still embryonic. In an attempt to partially fill this gap, this paper presents empirical data from an electronic survey conducted among 96 manufacturing SMEs to investigate e-commerce initiatives and their related benefits. E-commerce initiatives are assessed using a set of 36 business processes that can be conducted electronically. These processes were classified according to their focus: customer (downstream), supplier (upstream) or in-house. The research findings point to four main profiles of manufacturing SMEs with different e-commerce focuses. The first group seems to lack any focus or may still be exploring e-commerce opportunities. The second and third groups are supplier- and customer-focused, respectively. The fourth group consists of the more involved SMEs that have leveraged their e-commerce initiatives with both their customers and their suppliers. Results also suggest the existence of a close alignment between e-commerce focus and related benefits.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Technology, ESG, Université du Québec à Montréal—UQAM, C.P. 8888, succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3C 3P8

    Elie Elia

  2. ePoly Centre of Expertise in Electronic Commerce, École Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3C 3A7

    Elie Elia, Louis-A. Lefebvre & Élisabeth Lefebvre

Authors
  1. Elie Elia
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  2. Louis-A. Lefebvre
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  3. Élisabeth Lefebvre
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Correspondence to Elie Elia.

Additional information

An earlier and much shorter version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37). Helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers were greatly appreciated. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from SSHRC, FCAR and NSERC.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 7

Table 7 The mean level of complexity [Within each of the five generic functional activities, business processes are listed in increasing degree of complexity (rounded to two decimals). The numbers in front of each business process refer to those presented in Fig. 1. The complexity score is based on Likert scales where 1 = the lowest and 7 = the highest.] for the 36 business processes as assessed by the panel of experts
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Appendix 2

Table 8

Table 8 Benefits derived from e-commerce initiatives and supporting literature
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Appendix 3

Table 9

Table 9 Focus of e-commerce initiatives: results of cluster analysis (n = 96) using non-weighted scores
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Appendix 4

Table 10

Table 10 Business processes ranked according to their use by all four groups of firms
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Elia, E., Lefebvre, LA. & Lefebvre, É. Focus of B-to-B e-commerce initiatives and related benefits in manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises. ISeB 5, 1–23 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-006-0035-8

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