Tut 8

MM College Assignment Submission Cover Sheet Student Name:

Stuti Shah

Student No:

2672051

Unit Code:

CP 795

Unit Name:

Emerging technologies.

Assignment No: if applicable Assignment Name:

Tutor 8

Date Due: Lecturer Name: Tutor Name:

Faculty / Staff only Date Received: Received by (Name): Signature or initials:

Case Study Folder Q8.1 Briefly describe the difference between Front-end operations and Backend operations as these terns relate to e-businesses.

A computer that handles communications processing for a mainframe. It connects to the communications lines on one end and the mainframe on the other. It transmits and receives messages, assembles and disassembles packets and detects and corrects errors. It is sometimes synonymous with a communications controller, although the latter is usually not as flexible. The support components of a computer system. It typically refers to the database management system (DBMS), which is the storehouse for the data. Case Study Folder Q8.2 ERP systems are sometimes said to have evolved out of MRP systems. Define both term and describe how the two types of systems differ from one another. ERP (enterprise resource planning) is an industry term for the broad set of activities supported by multi-module application software that helps a manufacturer or other business manage the important parts of its business, including product planning, parts purchasing, maintaining inventories, interacting with suppliers, providing customer service, and tracking orders. ERP can also include application modules for the finance and human resources aspects of a business. Typically, an ERP system uses or is integrated with a relational database system. The deployment of an ERP system can involve considerable business process analysis, employee retraining, and new work procedures. Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.

Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is software based production planning and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes. Although it is not common nowadays, it is possible to conduct MRP by hand as well. An MRP system is intended to simultaneously meet 3 objectives: •

Ensure materials and products are available for production and delivery to customers.

•

Maintain the lowest possible level of inventory.

•

Plan manufacturing activities, delivery schedules and purchasing activities.

MRP vs. ERP - Manufacturing management systems have evolved in stages over the past 30 years from a simple means of calculating materials requirements to the automation of an entire enterprise. Around 1980, overfrequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual readjustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed by the system, led MRP (Material Requirement Planning) to evolve into a new concept : Manufacturing Resource Planning (or MRP2) and finally the generic concept Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Reference: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/MRP2.jpg

Case Study Folder Q8.3 You have been employed by a manufacturing firm that employs 200 people. The firm manufactures, markets and distributes educational equipment including whiteboards, data projectors, desks, chairs etc. The firm would like to organise its company data using an ERP system. Write a report intended for senior management that discusses the pros and cons of outsourcing the project as opposed to creating an in-house system. Pros and cons of outsourcing the project as opposed to creating an in-house system: Advantages  Outsourcing project is a most effective way to extend the budget. When managers plan project outsourcing, they usually make it their aim to cut down the company's expenditures. There's always the risk of failure, but if we outsource carefully, we'll afford to implement projects of such a scale that would be impossible for us to reach on our own. Outsource service provider’s offer higher quality services at a lower cost such as USA, Britain outsource their IT jobs in India, china. Cutting the costs and upgrading the quality of services will expand the competitive capacity of business. It will save the company from retraining the employees (or even hiring new ones).  When we outsource IT development to an outside company, we can concentrate on our core activities. We won't be able to completely forget all about the project or its part that we have chosen to outsource as soon as we sign a contract with an outsource service provider. If we deal with an

experienced and highly qualified vendor, we'll be able to gain valuable expertise in support of our IT capacity (Tesler, 2005). Disadvantages  By outsourcing a business process, the businesses tend to loose the managerial control. It takes place because it is harder to manage the outsourcing service provider as compare to managing company's own employees.  Most firms skip the possible hidden costs of outsourcing which includes legal costs of putting together a contract between companies and time spent on coordinating the contracts; we feel that outsourcing reduces the overall expenditure of a business process.  Outsourcing can also prove to be a threat to the security and confidentiality of issues of a company. If the company is outsourcing business process such as payroll, confidential information such as salary will be known to the outsourcing service provider.  Outsourcing may also result into the possible loss of flexibility in reacting to changing business conditions, lack of internal and external customer focus and sharing cost savings. Loss of internally generated talent is yet another problem associated with the outsourcing as it may hamper the growth of an employee (Bays, n.d). Case Study Folder Q8.4 J2EE and .NET: - Both Sun’s java 2 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft .NET technologies are low-level technologies in terms of flexibility. Both permit for the separation of interface and implementation. For example the weather-prediction software used by the weather-service computer could be modified without users noticing on condition that the interfaces remained the similar. Both technologies deliver prewritten interfaces to software developers and facilitate communication with similar interfaces in other applications. Such as many .NET applications may interact with J2EE applications and vise-versa by using XML interfaces.

Differences: No. J2EE .NET 1. J2EE is a platform developed by Sun .NET

is

a

platform

Microsystems together with such industry developed and supported 2.

partners as IBM by Microsoft Its applications can operate on any OS like Its applications can run Unix, Linux.

3.

only on Microsoft based

OS computers. J2EE technologies are platform independent Its applications are written and language specific.

in any language like C#, VB. Its technologies are platform

specific

language independent.

and

Week 9 Tutorial Questions Case Study Folder Q9.1 Measuring the web site performance  Online Visitors: - We can easily measure the performance by the visitors how many visitor can visit on our web site. It increased the publicity of our web site.  Progress: - Publicity and visitors performance through we can easily check the progress of our web site.  Sales: - Sales is the other method to measure the web site performance.  Feedback: - Time to time we can take feedback from our customer to know about the required thing in our web site and convert towards it progress.  Order: - Order is the very simple method to measure the performance of our web site. It with in particular time duration orders are more then it means performance of our web site is good otherwise we need to improve it. Case Study Folder Q9.2  General Consumer Portals: - It offers large information applicable for general audience with different interests. Such as Yahoo and Alta Vista they extract the interests of viewers which are in shopping, news headlines, travel and auction. They do it by delivering links to content. For example Alta Vista on which user can start his browsing by checking news.  Personals portals: - they are kinds of consumer portals that permit audiences to make changes in content with the purpose of satisfying their own special interests. Such as weather, sports scores are customized content for extracting to promote viewer to make personal portals his default while accessing the web.  Vertical and Industry portals: - It attracts a limited class of viewers with common interests. For example BMW website where owners can learn about BMW cars, read latest news and rechecks BMW products. A subtype of the

vertical portal is the industry portal which catches the audiences who look for industry related information. Such as TruckNet a portal for trucking industry which reflects jobs, chats with others users and news about it.  Corporate portals: - These are used by employees of an organization, sellers, consumers and others firms to get accurate business activities and start commercial transactions. In real world it is an individual browser-based interface used by employees, vendors to gain access all business application and database of e-business’s ERP. It also possible to access all these resources through same browser interface. Case Study Folder Q9.3  Directory: - A web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. A web directory is not a search engine, and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords, instead it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site, rather than one page or a set of keywords. Examples of well known, general, web directories are Yahoo! Directory. Open Directory Project (ODP) is significant due to its extensive categorization and large number of listings and its free availability for use by other directories and search engines ((Napier, Judd, Rivers, Adams, 2006, P.335).  Search Engine: - A specialized program that facilitates information retrieval from large sources of the Internet. Search engines attempt to help a user locate desired information or resources by seeking matches to user-specified key words. The usual method for finding and isolating this information is to compile and maintain an index of Web resources that can be queried for the key words entered by the user. The indices are often built from specific resource lists, and may also be created from the output of Web crawlers, wanderers, robots, spiders, or worms. The indices are usually compiled during times of minimum network traffic. Different engines are appropriate for

different kinds of searches, and most can be optimized for specified results. Such as Google, yahoo (search engine, 2007). Case Study Folder Q9.4 E-business is not for a particular one site it is deal in many sites related to different purposes. Top five sites are following below with its name, URL, and a brief description of their products and services. Name of the SIte URL(Uniform Resource Locator) Products and services FTD.com http://www.ftd.com/522/ It is the flower gift shop which we can give to the friends greets and family members on any Alta Vista

http://www.altavista.com/

occasion. It is the search company which provide you information related to any topic for example: maps,

Virus Scan

jobs, real estate etc. http://au.mcafee.com/root/pack It sales the products related to the anti viruses which are protected by the Antivirus,

VisualWare

http://www.visualware.com/

Firewall and Antispyware. It is the software which is used for to measure the speed of the internet and also check the bandwidth in big industries and

Bluetooth

http://products.ec21.com

firms or organizations. This company deals in all type of Bluetooth latest and upgrade design at the international level.

Case Study Folder Q9.5

 Web content management and its importance: - Content management includes organizing and categorizing information from various sources like printed documents, emails. When the user tries to access content through web browser, content management is known as Web content management are often used for storing, controlling, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.  Importance: - it is a major factor in all management of an e-business’s website. It ensures the content of site is correct, timely, organized form, wideranging, easy to find and personalized to meet each user’s needs. It has many features like •

Creation and import of documents and multimedia content.

•

Recognition of all key users and their roles.

•

Assign different roles to various content categories.

•

Capability to publish the content to a repository to support access to content (wikipedia, 2007).

 Web metrics: - Today many web metrics like pages viewed the number of website visitors are used to measure ROI. A website’s server log files are the source of basic web metrics like date and time some WebPages are opened. For example advanced metric is the number of unique visitors. The level of web metrics is calculated by the needs of an individual e-business (Napier, Judd, Rivers, Adams, 2006, p.374).

Week 10 Tutorial Questions Case Study Folder Q10.1

Two successful sites are •

Amazon.Com

•

Dell.com

Amazon.com is the world famous web site which is deal related to the online shopping products. User can easily find the required product and easily online order for that product. Dell.com is the other world famous web site which deals in the all computer related accessories like notebook, desktop, server, storage & network, printer ink and toner, monitor electronics and accessories. Two an successful sites are: •

Web Ring

•

Globalize Interactive solutions

Web Ring is the web site deals in the computer products and its accessories which is not successful site for sell the computer products online. Globalise Interactive solutions web site is deals in products related to the clothes which are designed like aboriginal styles. Many people are not like this type of dresses. Case Study Folder Q10.2  Dot.com:- It is the company which deals on the internet web sites. Many companies in 1990 are fail cause of the web site because of these reasons:  Poor content quality: - Content quality of this web site is very poor.  Poor Advertisements: - There is no any advertisement related to the web site content pages.  Poor planned business model: - Business model of this sites are very poor as compared to other e-business web sites.  Product Prices: - Product prices are not match with the product retail prices.  Privacy: - Privacy of this web site is very poor.  Poor downloading: - The downloading of these sites are very poor as compared to the other web sites and it is also very slow on broadband connection.

 Made for profit: - It is basically made for profit in e-business web sites. But it is not work according to the planning. Case Study Folder Q10.3  Collaborative commerce: It means that companies communicate and cooperate with one another as part of a comprehensive value-added chain of suppliers, consultants, customers and even employees. This includes the exchange of ideas, information and product data as well as the conclusion of business transactions. Collaborative commerce results in increased profits (Arabe, 2001).  Semantic Web: - The semantic web is an extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. The Semantic Web is about having data as well as documents on the Web so that machines can process, transform, assemble, and even act on the data in useful ways (Altova, 2006).  Intelligent agent: - A software agent is any software that can perceives its environment in terms of available data and sensory information and act upon that information, to do a task for some intelligent entity in terms of other agents or a human. For example, agents could transmit a summary file on the first day of the month or monitor incoming data and alert the user when certain transactions have arrived (Revelli, n.d).  Internet2: - a consortium being led by 206 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry, and government that fostered today’s Internet in its infancy.

 X internet: - In short, the X Internet (or Extended Internet) is comprised of the myriad linkages between the physical world and the digital world. This burgeoning and utilitarian technology could prove to be the next big wave in the Information Age (Napier, Judd, Rivers, Adams, 2006, p.435). Case Study Folder Q10.5 Effect of Globalization on U.S. and worldwide E-business market: - American companies have migrated a large number of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries where it is cheaper to do business. It is known as outsourcing. Let suppose it "frees up" Americans to be innovators, designers of new technologies and concepts. These jobs are also being done by qualified professionals in other countries. President George W. Bush says to overcome these lost jobs, Americans will get better education. But even higher education, jobs such as medicine and research and development are successfully being done in other countries. In greater numbers, Americans with college degrees are unable to find work, while the same degrees in other countries are in demand. Even the education in the United States is losing ground as well. For example, intelligent design is being taught in some schools as biology even though it is not even a scientific theory. Evolution is literally being labeled as just another theory even though hundreds of scientific and medical fields are based upon evolution. How do you think antibiotics are becoming less effective? It is because bacteria are adapting into stronger and more dangerous diseases! Furthermore, President Bush is holding back stem cell research in the United States of America by preventing federal funding for stem cell lines. This has only pushed those companies willing to do this type of research to do it in other countries, thus handing

the

United

States

a

major

setback

in

medical

research.

We should not be against globalization, but the United States of America is seriously and increasingly falling behind when competing economically in the global market. Something needs to be done before more Americans leave for

better opportunities in foreign lands and before the American economy permanently stagnates (phil, 2006). References  Arabe, K., (2001). Industrial Net: Collaborative Commerce: In Your Future? Retrieved 20 May, 2007 from http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2001/05/collaborative_c.html?t=arch ive  Altova,

(2006).

Semantic

Web.

Retrieved

22

May,

2007

from

http://www.altova.com/semantic_web.html  Revelli, C., (n.d). The role of intelligent agents: a difficult definition. Retrieved 24 May, 2007 from http://www.agentland.com/cgibin/relocation.cgi?http://www.agentland.com/pages/learn/revelli/agents_intelli gents2.html  Phil, B., (2006). The Effects of Globalization on the United States of America. Retrieved 26 May, 2007 from http://www.philforhumanity.com/Globalization_of_the_U.S.A..html  Marketing,

(2007).

Search

engine.

Retrieved

28

May,

2007

from

http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/search_engine/  Napier. A., Judd. P., Rivers. O., Adams. A. (2006). E-business Technologies. Boston. Massachusetts. Course Technology  Wikipedia, (2007). Content management system. Retrieved 02 June, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system  Semantec Corporation, (2007). Threat Explorer. Retrieved 30 May, 2007 from http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/threatexplorer/threats .jsp?src=symsug_us  Richardson, W., (2006). Hacking examples. Retrieved 03 June, 2007 from http://www.witiger.com/ecommerce/hackingexample.htm  Mell, P & Wack, J., (2000). Computer Security Division: Mitigating Emerging Hacker Threats. Retrieved 01 June, 2007 from http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistbul/html-archive/jun-00.html

 Tesler, B., (2005). Intetics: Outsourcing IT Development: Advantages and Disadvantages. Retrieved 01 June, 2007 from http://www.webspacestation.com/it-outsourcingnews/articles/outsourcing.html  Bays, M., (n.d). White Paper: Human Resource Considerations In Outsourcing

IT.

Retrieved

01

June,

2007

from

http://www.tbicentral.com/white-papers/human-resource-considerations.asp  Tuteja, A., (n.d). Enterprise resource planning: What’s there in it! Retrieved 20 May, 2007 from http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/6045/erp.html