Electronic Commerce and the Internet

During recent years, the attention paid to the Internet as a global, open and hypermedia computer-mediated environment has likewise contributed to a rising public awareness about Electronic Commerce. The Institute for Information Management at the University of St. Gallen has initiated a Competence Center for Electronic Markets which focuses on the strategic potential of electronic commerce and includes eleven large Swiss and German companies. The talk will focus on the potentials for Electronic Commerce on the Internet and in particular on different architectures to do EDI via the Internet. 1 Competence Center for Electronic Markets: Research on the Strategic Potentials of Electronic Commerce The Competence Center (CC EM) combines a team of researchers at the university and a group of eleven partner companies from various industries with whom we explore three interrelated areas of electronic commerce (EC): retail and marketing, business business applications as well as intranets: • The Internet poses new opportunities for electronic marketing and advertising. The different services from hypermedia to newsgroups can be combined and integrated in order to improve customer relations, to open new ways of interaction with customers and to empower the customer to actively search and use information that you can provide. • Telematic infrastructures provide ample opportunities to build and redesign business to business relations, e.g. for outsourcing and distributed production infrastructures. EDI enables companies to redesign the production or logistics chain, to redesign entire business networks. • In order to utilize the advantages of EDI, internal processes like order management or invoice control have to be redesigned. A closed cycle of EDIFACT messages with suppliers and service providers enables firms to automatically use message references and generate messages without retyping what has been typed already by your business partner. In a similar way, the Internet can be used as a platform for