TITLE:
Multidimensional Business to Business E-Commerce Maturity Application: Assessment on Its Practicality
AUTHORS:
Norjansalika Janom, Mohd Shanudin Zakaria, Noor Habibah Arshad, Siti Salwa Salleh, Syaripah Ruzaini Syed Aris
KEYWORDS:
B2B E-Commerce, E-Readiness, Small Medium Enterprises, Maturity Assessment Application, Maturity Level
JOURNAL NAME:
iBusiness,
Vol.6 No.2,
May
23,
2014
ABSTRACT:
In most countries,
Small Medium Enterprise (SMEs) are known as main players in generating domestic-led investment and stimulate
economic expansion. They are vital for
economic growth and innovation, poverty reduction, local employment and
development, and social cohesion. However, in the current digitally-connected
trading economy, SMEs have face many new challenges that change the way SMEs
business-to-business (B2B) trading operates. Among these challenges ARE the level of B2B
e-commerce implementation and utilization that able to facilitate B2B trading
process. However,
the implementation of B2B
e-commerce is being categorized as a system with high degree of difficulty
since it involves complexity of the multiple relationships and interactions
between trading partners. The interactions are not just complicated by their
volume and variation in processes, but also by the complexity inherent in the
dependencies exist between different trading parties. Based on this, for
SMEs to partake in the B2B e-commerce activities, they need to have attained some reasonable level of
maturity or readiness measurement in order to participate in B2B e-commerce
initiatives. To overcome this, the robust multidimensional B2B e-commerce maturity
application to assess the e-readiness level is needed. This paper describes the
development of B2B e-Commerce
Maturity Application (BeMA) which involves several distinct sequential exploratory stages. In
order to ensure its validity and practicality, the application was evaluated by
35 selected SMEs. Based on the evaluation results, all respondents were agreed
on the model usefulness and its practicality. The research believes that the
model will provide practical guidance for SMEs to clearly define appropriate
method of measuring e-readiness and the recommendation approaches to improve
their B2B e-commerce maturity level.