Page 260 - Electronic Commerce

Business-to-Business Activities: Improving Efficiency and Reducing Costs

research and development services. Figure 5-2 summarizes these categories of support
activities.

Finance and Administration Human Resources Technology Development

Making payments to suppliers Hiring employees Creating and maintaining
Processing payments from Training employees virtual collaborative research 235
customers Evaluating employees work groups
Planning capital expenditures Administering benefit programs Posting research results Learning
Budgeting Compliance with government Publishing research reports
Planning operations record-keeping regulations online Cengage
Connecting researchers to
Operating computing outside sources of research
infrastructure 2015
and development services
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FIGURE 5-2 Categories of support activities
Human resources, payroll, and retirement plan services are all areas in which
small and midsized companies often look for outside help. These business processes
are subject to many detailed rules and regulations that often require an expert to
decipher. A wide range of companies offer human resource management services
online. Firms such as CheckPointHR offer a full range of services online; others, such
as Advantage Payroll, specialize in payroll processing services, which are also available
online. These business process outsourcing providers duplicate their clients’ human
resources and/or payroll functions on a password-protected Web site that is accessible
to clients’ employees. The employees can then access their employers’ benefits
information, find the answers to frequently asked questions, and even perform benefit
option calculations. Larger firms build these types of functions into their own internal
systems.
One common support activity that underlies multiple primary activities is training.
In many companies, the Human Resources Department handles training. Other
companies may decentralize this function and have individual departments administer
it. For example, insurance firms expend large amounts of resources on sales training. In
most insurance companies, the Sales and Marketing Department administers this
training. By putting training materials on the company intranet, insurance companies
can distribute the training materials to many different sales offices, yet coordinate the
use of those materials in the corporate headquarters sales office.
The Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson runs an extranet for current and
former employees, families of those employees, and employees of approved business
partners. Ericsson has more than 120,000 employees scattered across the globe. One
part of this extranet includes a Web site that enables current employees, retirees, and
other recipients of payments from the company’s medical and retirement plans to
efficiently track their benefits. Another part of the extranet includes a Web site designed
to facilitate knowledge management. Knowledge management is the intentional
collection, classification, and dissemination of information about a company, its
products, and its processes. This type of knowledge is developed over time by

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