Glossary

Business-to-business (B2B):

B2B refers to the transactions (purchases of equipment, supplies, services, etc.) that occur between businesses as opposed to between businesses and consumers.

E-commerce:

E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services over the Internet, especially over the World Wide Web.

E-marketplace:

The E-marketplace is the electronic community of buyers and suppliers that integrates buyers’ procurement systems with suppliers’ fulfillment systems thereby creating a single standard process for transacting business electronically.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP):

ERP systems (also called enterprise systems) are information systems that are intended to integrate all of an organization’s data and processes into a single uniform information system.

Enterprise system:

Enterprise systems (also called ERP systems) are information systems that are intended to integrate all of an organization’s data and processes into a single uniform information system.

Globalization:

The concept of Globalization is the acknowledgment of the increasing interconnectedness of people and places that were formerly seen as unconnected because of the physical distances between them. Their new interconnectedness is a result of the recent advances in transportation, communication, and information technologies.

Integration:

Organizations integrate the functions of many different departments in order to produce the output of the organization; however, in the past the information systems that served these different departments were unable to share data between systems – they were unintegrated. In IT the term Integration refers to the trend of designing information systems that are able to share data across functional boundaries. See “ERP” and “Enterprise systems”.

Legacy systems:

A Legacy System is simply an older information system that has not been replaced by a newer system. Legacy systems are frequently unintegrated and the trend towards integration is seeing many legacy systems replaced by more integrated or even enterprise systems; however, most legacy systems actually perform the functions for which they were designed quite well, it is simply that they were not designed to integrate with other systems.

Supply chain:

Supply Chain is a concept that sees the various organizations, people, resources, and information involved in bringing products to their ultimate consumers as a continuous stream (or chain) where resources and information flow through to that final purchase. Supply chain sees all of the involved organizations as connected in a network whose purpose is to deliver the final product.

Transaction cost theory:

Transaction Cost Theory is one of the earliest attempts to theoretically define the business organization in relation to the marketplace. Because an organization cannot control its interactions with the marketplace (leaving continual uncertainty as to costs), it attempts to minimize these interactions by bringing many otherwise market transactions inside the functions of the organization. Bringing these “transactions” inside the firm rationalizes the costs of the firm.