News in View: ecommerce crucial to manufacturing

NEWS Some of the UK's top manufacturers have admitted that ecommerce will soon be crucial to their survival. Speaking on Silicon's News in View this week, IT chiefs at Rolls Royce and BOC both identified ecommerce as vitally important to their bottom line. Brian Horrocks, business process development manager at Rolls Royce described ecommerce as the perfect way to reduce costs all round. He said: "Ecommerce will be seen as an important opportunity to reduce action times and improve companies ability to act on information." But with the Internet playing such an important role in today's business world, any company, regardless of when it was established, needs to be clear on what its ecommerce strategy will be. Organisations need to implement targets today and one such organization doing this is BOC Gases. Fulton Wilcox, ecommerce director at the chemicals giant, said: "I think it's certainly necessary to achieve goals demanded by customers of manufacturers. They all know about the opportunities that are out there. Whoever is best able to meet their demand for streamlining supply chains is going to get the business." But how long before ecommerce becomes part-and-parcel of a manufacturing business strategy? David Strang, partner at law firm, Barlow Lyde & Gilbert, thinks this is only a matter of time. Strang insisted: "I think in a sense it won't be a defining force. It will be a precondition for entering into the market. Soon the big companies like IBM and Dell will get to grips with it fully and that will trigger a ripple effect across the market very quickly. Either you do it or you won't be in business." For the full News in View programme see Silicon.com's Manufacturing Channel (http://www.silicon.com/a34638 )