ICT and e-Business Impact in the Retail Industry - empirica

e-Business in the Retail Sectorimpact of ICT on individual enterprises, selected industries and the EU economy; to (2)highlight barriers for ICT uptake; and to (3) identify and discuss public policy challenges.ICT and e-business impact: the case studies are representative examplesillustrating the impact of ICT and e-business on enterprises. While the impact on theretail industry is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, the case studies purposivelyillustrate effects on individual enterprises. The cases for example show how theadoption of ICT and e-business solutions can positively affect productivity byincreasing efficiency of employees (e.g. AMJG and Casino Group). The Globuscase study on the other hand illustrates that business process reengineering isnecessary to achieve a measurable return on investment from ICT uptake.Brookland Plus Products in contrast decided to adapt the ERP solution adopted toexisting business processes rather than adopting business processes to thesolution adopted. The different enterprise-level effects are incorporated in greaterdetail in chapter 4.Barriers to e-business: the case studies illustrate numerous barriers to e-businessand ICT uptake among European retailers. Especially barriers to e-sales areabundant: the case studies show that all types of firms from small to large (e.g.Fleria Floral Creations and EMPiK), across different NACE categories (food andnon-food groups) and EU countries (e.g. Cyprus, Poland, and Malta) experiencesignificant problems with selling over the internet. With the exception of one firm,4fitness, the proportion of online sales measured by the total sales volume remainslow (usually between 1 % and 10%) in European retail firms. Barriers to increasinge-sales include cultural issues such as customers not being prepared to order overthe internet (Cyprus-PC.com and Smart Supermarket), problems with integratingthe e-sales channel into the overall business strategy (EMPiK and Fleria FloralCreations), product suitability for e-sales (Fleria Floral Creations), and finding asuitable online strategy (Smart Supermarket). The case studies also highlight otherissues that retailers come across when implementing e-business solutions. In largefirms, introducing a unified ERP system may for example speed up the roll-out of e-commerce significantly as shown by the Mercator case. For in-house operations,the AMJG case study shows that not having customised solutions could be a barrierfor application usage. Overall, the case studies illustrate barriers for all threeelements of the supply chain supporting the survey findings relating to e-businessbarriers presented in Section 3.7.Public policy challenges: the case studies provide policy makers with real-lifeexamples of ICT and e-business effects and barriers. Policy makers can useinsights gained from the case studies to, for example, show how policyrecommendations could support individual European enterprises in increasingproductivity which, in turn can positively affect retail industry productivity and theEuropean economy.The following sub-sections 5.1 to 5.10 comprise the ten case studies conducted for theSeBW retail industry sector study.120