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Ecommerce's Monthly Talking Point: March 1999 Really Fulfilling Wherever you find a group of people discussing ecommerce - and these groups are everywhere, blocking your access to the coffee jug at conferences, distracting your attention at neighbouring tables in restaurants - there's one subject you can bet won't come up: fulfilment. Fulfilment is an emotionally rich word which packages a set of fundamental, but unglamorous, functions. Basically, it means delivering what we've sold. The fact that there's a word for it - and probably a science of it - shows that fulfilment is meant to be a function separate from the rest of commercial life. It must be something done by someone who's not involved in the production or sale of a product or service. The folks you're overhearing as they fail to mention fulfilment are conversing at the headiest level of marketing. Now that e-verything begins with an e, they're doing more than just boxing off the delivery process in a cute word. They're losing sight of physical closure altogether. This could just be because so few people talking about ecommerce have any experience of selling anything through that channel. They're concentrating on the channel as a novelty, rather than as a suplementary or superseding channel amongst many. On the other hand, it could be because the ecommerce climate of opinion that currently reigns, softened and homogenised as it is by acres of hype, is so heavy with the revolutionary spin associated with the channel that it hasn't absorbed the implications of revolution on business process. For the fact of the matter is that successful ecommerce is only partly about nifty technology. It's also about ripping apart all your business infrastructure as a new type of engine - with its strange new fuel, weird maintenance schedule and creepy technicians - slams into the centre of your operations. Ecommerce changes the companies it alights upon. Fulfilment is perhaps the most live issue facing enterprises who are committing to ecommerce. It's not difficult to throw a product catalogue up on the web. But it's very hard to scale your production and distribution efforts up and down to meet unpredictable new demands. Much attention is paid to the scalability of servers for ecommerce, but little to the scalability of the other systems - human and automated - that make the entire company dance. Yet it's the people, practices and processes that your ecommerce efforts touch upon that bear the brunt of the change. As we begin to tire of the novelty of ecommerce, we'll hear more groans about its inability to deliver on its promises. When that happens, be sure to widen the net before condemning the company's high-profile ecommerce system project out of hand. It may just be that the project was never conceived within a strategic context. It's happened before.
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