Getting serious about e-Business means fundamentally changing the way an organization thinks about its entire operation. e-Business can completely redefine relationships with customers, employees, distributors and vendors. For those who master e-Business, the rewards are plentiful and include increased revenue, expanded markets, reduced costs and improved customer service. Are you ready?
e-Business is the use of network-enabled processes and activities to transform relationships between internal and external entities and the organization that enhance the organizations' ability to maximize opportunities. To successfully implement a total e-Business solution, companies must consider all its components and how they interact. These components include e-Commerce, supply chain management, knowledge management, business intelligence, and enterprise application integration and customer relationship management. Entiv describes this interaction in terms of our e-Business anatomy diagram.
A successful, integrated e-Business strategy requires innovative and well-planned solutions. Entiv can help overcome these challenges and help organizations reap the rewards of e-Business. We have extensive experience in building industrial-strength e-Business solutions for a wide variety of industries.
In addition to the business and technical abilities we possess, Entiv offers outstanding program management that can take a company from high-level concepts and successfully guide it through the everyday details and issues to a target set of solutions. Our approach is flexible and iterative, and involves clients in each step to ensure clearly defined expectations and superior communication. Finally, we focus on knowledge transfer, assuring customer independence and success.
What is your e-Business Objectives?
Scope of our expertise
Entiv's 3D Advantage
From strategic consulting through technological implementation, Entiv delivers. We blend business and technology with innovation for a full-scale e-Business solution.
Instead of simply building technical solutions, we consult and guide our customers through the many facets necessary to build a robust, well-rounded and architected business solution. Entiv's 3D Advantage utilizes a single, common method that easily accommodates multiple entry points. It is comprised of three integrated, flexible components-each adaptable to specific client needs and situations-that are designed to achieve results rapidly and thoroughly. This series of repeatable processes and components encompasses multiple facets, ensuring that all aspects of an organization and the end result's impact on them will be considered when developing a business solution.
Discover
The Discovery phase educates sponsors and key managers, solidifies overall business strategies, examines key issues, core competencies, organizational readiness, competitive pressures, etc. It is accomplished by conducting executive workshops, research and analysis; reviewing capabilities; and identifying and prioritizing strategies and projects. Deliverables include updated business strategies; open issues resolution plans, overall project timelines with prioritized initiatives, readiness assessments, quick hits and resource requirements.
Design
The Design phase takes input from the business strategy and defines the solution from a business perspective. Utilizing the business architecture as a guide, we create functional, informational, organizational and process requirements, and design blueprints of the system and its components. Deliverables include system and business architecture reports, site name and branding reports, detailed delivery project plans and solution prototypes.
Deliver
Finally, the Delivery phase gathers all this information and builds and integrates complete applications. This may include detailed technical specs, creative treatments, custom applications, package solutions and infrastructure. Success relies on a well-tested, functional and fully implemented solution. Deliverables include completed applications and application tests, training and skills development, and relevant documentation.
Entiv also provides superior program management abilities-our project managers are continually trained and audited, ensuring knowledge of best practices. They are supplied with the framework and resources to provide consistency and accuracy. These repeatable processes and tools provide the capability to enforce the standards of the project, maintaining focus on the goals and providing solutions to any issues that may arise.
Entiv takes a holistic view of an organization's business issues in planning for its eventual business solution. Aspects such as technology, marketing, geography and customers are taken into consideration. We involve our customers in each step of the project to ensure clearly defined expectations and superior communication. This collaborative approach achieves a thorough and complete business solution with end-to-end integration.
Entiv's flexible approach, integrated with our senior-level business and technology experience, forms a complete e-Business solution custom designed to meet our customers' needs and deliver success.
e-Commerce
Is your e-Commerce initiative yielding the results you expected? Is your e-Commerce strategy integrated with your enterprise or is it simply a superficial, disconnected enhancement? Are you using e-Commerce technology to gain a competitive advantage and improve your bottom line?
Moving into the e-Commerce arena can bring significant challenges to an organization. They must learn how to manage on-line branding issues and maintain their changing customer relationships. Systems must be robust, integrated and scalable. A wide array of business decisions, from import/export issues to product distribution systems must be determined. Finally, companies will need to deal with the massive business transformation issues that arise when moving beyond traditional brick and mortar operations. Getting there is anything but easy.
Entiv has extensive experience helping organizations deal with the challenges and changes an e-Commerce effort brings. We offer a full range of services that can aid in the process of "going live," including strategic consulting, marketing and brand management, data and technical architecture, relationship management, software system development, hosting, fulfillment, infrastructure planning and implementation. In addition, we have extensive experience integrating front-end solutions with integral back-end systems, thereby maximizing the value of e-Commerce systems and helping to deliver optimal results.
Supply chain management
According to industry experts like AMR Research, Inc., the supply chain management (SCM) market is expected to grow to $18.6 billion by 2003 - a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent. However, implementing an effective SCM initiative is one of the most complex challenges an organization can face, as it effects nearly every aspect of the company.
That remarkable growth rate has turned many heads, but implementing an effective SCM improvement is one of the most complex challenges an organization can face. Supply chain management involves the highly complicated effort of managing the flow of products from raw materials procurement through manufacturing and logistics to transportation and warehousing to delivery of finished products to customers. It involves efficiently creating products and getting them into your customers' hands.
The essence of SCM is finding the optimal balance between satisfying your customers and achieving operational efficiency. And companies who manage to do these things well achieve operational excellence - as well as many other benefits. E.D. McCallum & Associates predicts that extended supply chain capabilities can cut supply chain costs in half, reduce inventory by up to 60 percent, improve delivery performance by up to 28 percent, increase forecasting accuracy by up to 80 percent and improve overall productivity by more than 10 percent.
The rewards are certainly impressive, but the challenges are immense. For one thing, changes in supply chain operations can impact virtually every aspect of an organization, including manufacturing, logistics, information services, and sales and marketing. It demands that you examine and leverage every component of your operations, including your infrastructure, sourcing, inventory, and manufacturing and transportation decisions. In addition, the traditional approach - boosting production and inventories in advance of demand - is no longer feasible in light of today's competitive pressures to reduce costs and accommodate mass customization. The key business challenge today is cost-effective agility - optimizing asset deployment toward sudden demand.
The road to operational excellence can be rocky, but Entiv can help smooth the way.
Entiv blends innovation with real-world solutions to enable customers to make better operational decisions, faster. We provide a full range of supply chain consulting and technology implementation services - everything from enterprise-wide strategic planning to designing, building and implementing solutions to integrating existing systems. Combining a highly collaborative style, senior-level industry experience, and innovative tools and methods, we help customers realize exceptional operational results quickly. We partner with our customers every step of the way, and we focus on knowledge transfer–a key in deriving customer success and independence. Entiv is intimately familiar with leading practices in SCM, we are a member of the Supply Chain Council–a non-profit organization focused on leading practices and models, and can work with organizations to improve operation and financial performance.
Knowledge management
Knowledge management (KM) is one of the most talked about management concepts today, but is also one of the least understood. It means different things to different people, and is confusing for most. At its simplest, knowledge management is about getting knowledge from the people who have it to those who need it. As we enter an era where workers are steeped in the complexity of a rapidly changing economy, their ability to learn from each other translates directly to the success of their organization. In addition, organizations are realizing that their employees' knowledge is a real asset, deserving similar management as other business assets.
KM is more than the latest fad, more than fancy technologies and tools. It is people, processes and technologies combined to address the many facets of managing an organization's knowledge. It includes moving knowledge from tacit forms-knowledge locked in people's heads-into explicit forms that can be structured, stored and organized for others to access. KM is about defining and tracking the human expertise existing in your organization. It is also about helping people get together, in person or virtually, to discuss, share and create innovation.
An organization with a focused KM effort can reap tremendous benefits from a well-connected workforce. Your organization retains critical learning that is normally lost when employees move inside the organization or depart it entirely. Your employees are better trained and more capable. They can share ideas across greater distances, a crucial factor in a global economy. Best practices and methods are widely available and centralized, resulting in higher quality products and services, and eliminating the "reinventing the wheel syndrome." Costs are reduced from sharing techniques for optimizing business activities and processes. Overall, KM improves your company's responsiveness to customer needs by leveraging your organization's entire knowledge base.
But achieving these rewards can be challenging. Many products claiming to be KM tools crowd the market. Moreover, simply installing these tools is only part of the solution; a successful KM implementation demands serious attention to the human factors of knowledge management: things like incentives, processes, coordination and facilitation, events and organizational change.
Entiv is poised to help you develop a comprehensive KM solution. Our solutions leverage the entire spectrum of knowledge management components, including building community, capturing knowledge, and establishing organizations and systems to support knowledge dissemination to the right people.
Business intelligence
Is your organization struggling to understand how to use its data to make sound, strategic and tactical decisions to gain the competitive edge? Are your business partners, and even customers, hungry for increased visibility to your information so they can make better decisions? Are you overwhelmed by the myriad of technologies and architectures available to solve these problems?
As organizations grow and continue to collect more and more data about their customers and how they operate, it becomes increasingly difficult to turn that data into useful information that will help managers, customers and partners improve their decision-making processes.
Business intelligence (BI) takes raw data and transforms it into understandable, relevant business information. It allows users to access and analyze structured data, and ultimately make better-informed decisions.
BI can help an organization address its information access issues, including the need for management reporting, external data sourcing, data cleansing, sophisticated data analyses and performance-based measurement. BI can provide several other significant benefits: It enables organizations to turn their data into useful information that helps managers, customers and partners make effective, informed decisions. It allows organizations to handle the pressures of increasing competition, customer-centric markets and customized products in the face of ever-changing technology. It also provides valuable business information on customers, competitors, suppliers, market trends and other external factors.
Business intelligence offers innovative opportunities for capturing and processing new information, and Entiv can help make those opportunities work for you. We will collaboratively plan, design and implement the processes and tools to both acquire and maximize information value to produce significant, measurable benefits. To deliver this promise, Entiv offers you the full spectrum of business intelligence services. Our approach includes project discovery and assessment, business requirements analysis, source systems analysis, database design and implementation, system design, implementation and testing. We provide expertise and experience with data storage and manipulation tools, fused with web-enabling technologies. In addition, Entiv was selected by Microsoft to sit on their Business Intelligence Partner Advisory Council due to our leadership in the business intelligence sector and, in collaboration with Data General and Microsoft; we have developed a Business Solutions Center at our Los Angeles location.
Enterprise application integration
The aftermath of mergers and acquisitions. The need to quickly respond to market demands. The transition from traditional brick and mortar operations to the e-Commerce realm. Each situation is crucially dependent on successfully integrated applications and operations.
Enterprise application integration (EAI) ties the flow of transactions among different applications and business processes within and among organizations.
EAI solutions can benefit an organization by providing end-to-end visibility and control of business operations. This control improves interactions with partners and customers; increases responsiveness to business changes; enables new market opportunities; and makes captured knowledge more widely available. EAI also provides advantages through uniting disparate applications; reducing redundant data entry; merging diverse data sets; and reducing transaction costs.
An industry leader in EAI implementations, Entiv provides customers with service based on proven experience. We have both the technical and business expertise required to deliver complex, enterprise-wide solutions. Our capabilities include EAI vision and strategy development, EAI solution architecture, and EAI solution implementation based on industry-leading methodologies. Our EAI technical and business expertise is supplemented by Entiv's project delivery framework for smooth project planning and execution.
Customer relationship management
One of the most critical components of your organization's success lies in the strength of the relationships you have with your customers. Do you know who your customers are? Do you know what they like or dislike about your organization? Can you continue to satisfy their needs through relationship innovations?
According to a recent GartnerGroup survey of 150 CIOs, the No. 1 business priority is to improve customer service. To achieve this goal, many organizations are embarking on customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. CRM is a customer-focused strategy designed to maximize revenue, profitability and customer satisfaction by implementing systems that track and support customer relations. A successful CRM system is based on the principle that it is far less expensive to sell to satisfied existing customers than it is to develop relationships with new ones.
The CRM approach integrates and refines those areas of your organization that touch your customer. It can take advantage of the Internet's communications impact and modern software development's enterprise integration capabilities. With CRM, organizations have a clearer picture of their customers, and customers have a loyal relationship with a company that "knows them."
Organizations not well focused on customer relationship management will often experience costly customer "churn," or will find that they are out of touch with their market at crucial times of change. They also are more vulnerable to competitors, since their customers have less incentive to stay with the company and will chase new products that come along, no matter who produces them.
When utilizing a CRM system, organizations must first have a clear understanding of who their customers are, and what they want. Depending on their customer base, organizations may need to consider different cultural, technical, socio-economic and even legal issues. These factors will influence how the CRM system should be developed and how that information can be used.
At Entiv, we have expertise in web tracking, web-based customer service, systems integration, call center integration, user behavior analysis, recommendation engines and many other CRM components. Entiv can help you determine how CRM is an opportunity for your business, then work with you to establish a strategic approach and vision, translate that vision into potent projects and architectures, and develop new systems with remarkable ROI.
Business operations/ERP
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the backbone of an organization's internal operations, and encompasses such important functions as distribution, manufacturing, supply chain, finance, human resources and payroll.
Through use of an ERP package, those areas of operation are consolidated into a single, enterprise-wide solution that ensures seamless communication within mission-critical systems and allows the organization to adapt to changing business needs.
A single enterprise-wide solution creates an opportunity for accelerated future implementation schedules. When software upgrades are available, organizations need only upgrade a single software package, rather than sorting through several different systems to determine which require upgrading and then working to ensure all new applications can continue to function together. When it is not necessary to transfer that data among other systems, there is less risk the data will be corrupted. ERP systems lay the foundation for computer system globalization, data centralization, defined processes and remote access business operation.
The benefits of a single enterprise-wide ERP solution are many, but successfully implementing this type of a solution is a large, complex and highly involved undertaking. When implementing business solutions, organizations must consider the following: How will an ERP integration impact my overall operations? How will the new system affect my existing processes? What additional technologies will be required to fully integrate the system? How should we manage the change resulting from the implementation? With a well-suited software package and the appropriate staffing of both business and technical resources, the benefits make it a worthwhile endeavor, both now and in the long term.
Entiv's expertise in the ERP arena includes extensive hands-on experience with such world-renowned packages as J.D. Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP. We also support several major databases, such as SQL Server and Oracle; and many major platforms, including the AS/400, NT, HP9000, Dec Alpha and Sun Solaris. Entiv works with many different sized companies, and can either implement an entire system or specific modules. We begin this process by mapping your organization's internal operations to identify the project's scope. We'll then develop a plan to implement the appropriate solution with minimal effect on your operations. Entiv also offers comprehensive mentoring to ensure your employees can use the system and your IT staff can maintain daily operations
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