Why implement eBusiness/eCommerce solutions?

Let’s get this straight – eBusiness and eCommerce are NOT trends, but new ways to conduct business in the future. You will continue using your ERP system since it is the backbone. Additionally, some of your customers are still using traditional means of communication such as fax, EDI or even paper. But virtually every company is in the process of building or improving its eBusiness model to meet the ever-increasing demands of its customers - suppliers, vendors, partners and employees. Use your eBusiness architecture, integrated applications, IT infrastructure, ERP investment and your business process differentiation to connect your enterprise and your supply chain to get ahead of your competition and position yourself as an industry leader. ECommerce allows you to give your customers what they want, when and how they want it and at a lower cost as ever before. Traditional values are being challenged and new ones such as speed, convenience, personalization, price and customer satisfaction emerge. And here is the fun part: Integrated, reliable, easy to use, rich functionality will elevate your company to the next level and immediately contributes to the bottom line. Your ROI with intra, extra and internet-enabled eBusiness will beat your expectations since it is higher than any previous project you have tackled. Do you agree now that ‘plain’ ERP is not enough anymore?

Why PeopleSoft?

One word: Integration. Leverage your initial ERP investment and capabilities and avoid the high cost of multiple point solutions, such as maintenance, synchronization, and upgrades. With the headaches of your PeopleSoft implementation behind you, the true power and ROI of your ERP system can now be unleashed. Your PeopleSoft applications can be integrated within your intranet and extranet as well as the internet to provide many benefits and savings to your business and your customers. PeopleSoft enables new technologies to deploy eBusiness to your employees, customers and vendors in the form of self service applications, web enablement, custom applications based on your business needs as well as newer offerings such as eProcurement and eStore. With integrated merchants such as Commerce One and Sabre, 3tier architecture, open integration framework and the web client, the possibilities for improvement are endless. And to ensure your business relays on safe and secure relay of information, PeopleSoft provides tools to integrate security into your enterprise model.

What should you consider before implementing?

The real challenge of eBusiness is the task of making it happen. As you already know from your initial PeopleSoft implementation(s), a competent project team can make or break your project. Do your homework in finding a knowledgable partner.

Let me give you a few facts about this new exiting technology that you may want to consider in your decision-making. With PeopleSoft's new technolgoy your end users do not have to have the actual PeopleSoft application sitting on their desktop. You need to run at least Tools Version 7.03. PeopleSoft recommends using the following browers: Internet Explorer 4.01 or Netscape 4.51 with the Java/JVM 1.1.2 plug in (PeopleTools version 7.55 is required).

As you may be aware, the web client uses Java Applets and HTML. The initial download of the applets (approx. 1.3 – 2.3MB) can take a few minutes – however there are certain “tricks” you can use to increase performance. However, if you have employees that are going to access the self-service application through dial-up, I would not recommend using this functionality.

You can of course modify the delivered requisition self-service functionality (you can even build your own from scratch) and your developers will be able to use their current application knowledge to build it. HTML knowledge has never hurt anyone, but is not required (same with Java).

One of the drawbacks of using the delivered self-service requisition piece (or any other web client application) is that printing is not possible. However, supposedly Crystal 5.6 has a web client component that can be downloaded for that purpose. The web client also runs on both NT as well as NT web servers.

There are also many web authoring tools available, such as Net Objects Fusion, Adobe Pagemill and Sausage Hot Dog that can your life much easier, if you want to create your own custom functionality. PeopleSoft’s HTML Access tool is also a new slick tool (if you have at least version 7.54) that you can use to really create professional looking web pages, however, your developers would then need to know HTML and Active Server Pages.

The important thing is to keep your audience in mind. If they are casual users, self-service is the way to go. But also keep in the back of your mind that it is possible to deploy regular PeopleSoft panels on the web (intra, extra- or internet) – that would be recommended for your power users that are already been trained and comfortable with PeopleSoft.

After reading this article you should have a good introductory understanding of PeopleSoft's new offering and you should now be able to ask the right questions. Can you afford NOT to implement this exiting new technology?