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Management & Economics of e-Business

Semester Presentation:

Presented to: Dr P. Wamuyu

Paul Kahoro – 642451

Pauline Wamere-642304

Online Listings of properties for sale

These are the enhancements that if done on the real estates websites, one is able to see a full display of

what the firm has to offer. This will be very easy for prospective clients to be able to view pictures, price

ranges and other house details that they may be interested in when searching for a home

Print adverts intergrated with online postings

These are the property listings that are posted on newspapers however in todays modern world a lot of

newspapers are digital so thay would be able to appear in the newspapers online listings once

subscribed.

Broadcast adverts

This is whereby the property postings are advertised in TV or Radio adverts; it would be key to align the

processes taking advantage of Ebusiness tools to be able to intergrate the model as well.

Personal contacts list and customer feedback

Without a robust ebusiness model it will be very difficult to maintain a consistent database of

information having the full details, preferences and buying pertterns of clients who are interested in the

properties

Online Listings of PropertiesTelevision and Radio Broadcast AdvertisentsIntergrating online newspapers from print broadcasts

Customers personal contact Lists and feedbackFig. 1 Showing the integration of e-business

For the real estate agents to create an innovative e-business design, they should first answer the following questions:

What capabilities and competencies are required to create rich customer experiences?These decisions determine what your customer sees and encounters when interacting

with your e-business design. Today’s consumers are using online listings to find their

homes/properties. By equipping them with the tools they need to conduct their own

research, the agencies can pass the savings along to their customers making them happy

and content. The agents can also use newsletters, social media, webinars and

events/forums to educate their customer base on key topics. Such steps create rich

customer experiences.

What business design can make your customers’ shopping and service experiences unique and memorable?A good example is if the agents were to provide and deliver better end-to-end services.

Total and complete service is important because it's what a customer experiences and,

moreover, truly cherishes. When assessing a business design's value, the agents should

ask themselves whether it meets their customers' priorities not only today but also in the

future.

In the quest for efficiency, how should they structure their agencies for efficiency?The real estate agents should be innovative in how they not only sell but also sign up

for listed properties. The agents should use a list-to-order (LTO) business model.

Since not so many people are aware of the processes required in property sales and

purchases they should help in taking the guesswork out of the home buying/selling

process through helping property buyers and sellers sign with confidence.

- They should have their own lawyers readily available to provide legal any legal

advice to interested buyers/sellers who don't have one. With a real estate lawyer’s

specialized knowledge, they could offer clients superior protection and negotiating

power.

- The agents should also be well equipped in handling legal content of the paperwork

to boost agency process efficiency.

- They can also develop financial provision services between their agencie and

financial institutions that can enable their customer base to easily access financial

services such as loans if they don't have one. This will be an efficeint process and

can increase the chances of convincing and making more sales.

More than Technology:

What sets the truly great real estate agencies apart is their ability to use state-of-the-art e-business processes to transform themselves. The agents should ensure their agencies do the following three things well:

1. They should redefine value for their customers.2. They build powerful e-business designs that outperform the competitions.3. They understand customer priorities and consistently raise customer expectations to new heights.

Important steps to follow:

1. Self-diagnosis:Before embarking on your journey to create an e-business design, you must first assess

the impact of recent customer, business, and technological trends on your agency by

asking the following questions.

• Has the recent wave of technological innovation created new ways of doing business

and reorganizing priorities within your agency?

• Is your agency responding to changing customer expectations? Is it aware of the

dimensions of value that your customers care about?

• Is your agency willing to question and to change countless industry assumptions to take

advantage of new opportunities while also preserving existing investments in people,

applications, and data?

• Is your agency successful at lowering operating costs while making complex business

applications adaptive and flexible to change under the relentless pressure of time to

market?

If all your answers are yes, you and your agency are in the innovator, or market leader,

category in today's real estate environment.

2. Reverse the Value chain:

The greatest challenge in e-business is linking emerging technology to a company's new

business design. Were it just a matter of linking emerging technologies to existing markets or

vice versa, management's challenge would be relatively easy. But when both current

technology and markets are changing and are doing so dynamically, this linking becomes a

delicate process indeed

Successful companies no longer just add value; they invent it. To invent value, managers must

reverse the traditional value chain thinking characteristic of the inside-out model in which

businesses define themselves in terms of the products they produce (see Figure below). In this

traditional model, managers concentrate on being effective and competitive by putting well-

understood products on the market. In the new world we're entering, however, the business

design must be outside in.

3. Chose a focus:Although adopting new technology can enable firms to excel, it can also disable firms that don't concentrate on its best use. Market leaders use three types of e-business designs to narrow their focus and to retain market leadership, knowing that few organizations can do many things well.In order to narrow its circle of competence, a successful agency chooses one of the following types of focused excellence:• Service excellence: —Delivering what customers want with hassle-free service and superior value• Operational excellence: —Delivering high-quality products quickly, error free, and for a reasonable price• Continuous-innovation excellence: —Delivering products and services that push performance boundaries and delight customers.The objective here is straightforward. To succeed, an agency e-business design must be focused. Once this focus has been decided, commit the resources required for its implementation.

Step 4. Execute Flawlessly:Once you've made the tough decisions required to coordinate these business processes, you must then figure out how to change your company and how to implement the decisions you've made. How can you move from where you are today to where you want to be? How do you integrate and tailor your legacy infrastructure to meet new e-business requirements?

Take home lessons from e-business designs:

Be customer focused.

Value creation is a continuous process.Transform business processes into digital form. - words and numbers on paper are

dead—you can't work with them. In digital form, information comes alive. It can be

analyzed creatively, searched quickly, updated easily, and shared broadly.

Decentralize management but centralize coordination. Decentralized management

with centralized coordination means designing the business and the technology around

the information flow.

Create an e-business application architecture.

Conclusion on e-business design:Realistically, a firm can choose only one of three business design disciplines—service

excellence, operational excellence, or continuous-innovation excellence—in which to

specialize. Some exceptional agencies are able to do all three well. Unfortunately, most

agencies do not specialize in any of these and therefore realize only mediocre or

average levels of achievement. Refusing to create and to implement a focused business

design, and the complacency this attitude reflects, will not lead to increased market

share, sales, or profits but rather could, in fact, lead to bankruptcy or extinction.

Once the design is in place, they are ready to move to the next level: creating the application infrastructure. The e-business application infrastructure supports the e-business design by providing the software functionality required for the business design to work. Early in the e-business revolution, many businesses raced onto the Web only to discover—often quite painfully—that having a URL doesn't spell automatic success. If you attempt to win the business of the e-customer without rock-solid,bullet-proof e-commerce applications and back-office integrated systems, you will succeed only in alienating that customer. In order to ensure their e-business success, real estate agencies must create a strong application infrastructure foundation from which they can deploy their e-business applications. Addressing enterprise-wide infrastructure needs first means avoiding the integration issues resulting from disparate systems, data formats, and legacy applications.

It is however important for real estate agencies to work towards having a forward-thinking application infrastructure that addresses the following three critical requirements:

• Interface. —Business innovators do not want new technology just for its own sake. They want new systems to support the

key business practices within their industry and the interfaces they have with their suppliers and customers, without losing a

step.

• Integration. —Business innovators want to streamline and to integrate their business processes, using their new

information systems.

• Innovation. —Business innovators demand new and more advanced applications to help them grow quickly.

The foremost objectives of the e-business application architecture are to improve customer satisfaction and to reduce operating cost. Process integration allows innovators to gain operating efficiencies, improve information flow among various departments, and build predictability and repeatability within their business processes.Integrate, but plan for continuous growth and change.

Keep in mind the following maxims:

• Start small. e.g improve your Website and make it available to your key customer for them to acess key business information, such as property listings.• Build on success. Add more features to the customer Web page, allowing suppliers to download a bill property materials, for example.• Build, launch, and learn. —Be willing to scrap a system. Initial efforts may need to be reworkedlater as you expand your capabilities. Faster ROI

Trends Driving e-Business Architecture

The following three business trends are driving e-business architecture decisions.• The velocity of business is increasing. —Speed to market is essential for seizing opportunities.• Enterprise boundaries are disappearing. —The new business paradigm requires that nonemployeeshave controlled access to internal systems.• Expectations for technology solutions are rising. —Customers, employees, managers, and partnersexpect more in a short period of time.

The technology, utilities, and services needed for uninterrupted flow of e-commerce

structural foundation supporting the app layer is a balance of structure and flexibility

harnesses, safeguards, manages, and permits use of information in ways that are fast,

safe and simple comprises the tech, utilities, and services needed for uninterrupted flow of

e-commerce

• CRM• ERP• EAI (Enterprise Application Integration)• E-Procurement• Financial Control• Business Intelligence• Supply Chain Management• Selling chain• Portals

Diagrammatic summary of E-Business Application