Business
In the industrial area the supplier can transfer thus technical specifications in the direct contact with the customer, wishes of delivery and not seldom also a demanded cooperation with other suppliers question, provide tailor-made offers, without field service visit or luxurious further inquiries in his data bank or CAD/CAM/CAQ systems for the planning and in the shortest time.
The sales medium wins on account of the high availability of the Internet in Europe increasingly in meaning for the consumer goods sales and is applied in a few points for subsequent shops in the capital goods sales.
Today one understands by electronic trade as a rule all methods of the winding up of shops and administrative processes about electronic canals and the Internet or at least the technologies used on the Internet and protocols play an essential role and the information technology is looked generally as a condition. On this occasion, an important aspect is the abolition of media breaks as they are typical in the conventional commercial winding up. Besides, the interventions should be reduced by people in the course of business on the necessary minimum. One speaks in the case of Straight Through Processing what requires an extensive integration of the commercial functions.
If one ties together for this purpose use systems from different functional areas or about enterprise borders away, it concerns a classical use field of Enterprise Application integration (EAI). Enterprise Content management (ECM) is looked as one of the base technologies about e-business.