SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY

 

 

SCHOOL OF COMPUTING AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

 

 

SEMESTER TWO EXAMINATIONS - June 2004

 

Unit Title:     

e-Business

Unit No:

12-2206-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time Allowed:           

2 Hours

 

 

CCC is a pre-seen case study

 

 

 

 

 


Stationery requirements:                   

·         Three 8-page answer books

·         Supplementary answer sheets available on request

 

 


INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES:

 

1.         The normal examination regulations of the University apply (see script                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 answer book).

 

2.         Paper is in two sections.  You are required to answer

 

Ο      Two questions from Section 1.

Ο      Three questions from Section 2.

 

4.         Answer each Section in a separate answer book.

 

 

5.         CCC is an open case study, published to the students at the beginning of the academic year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIS PAPER CONTAINS   PAGES INCLUDING THIS SHEET

CCC case study

 

Having worked for several small bakeries in the Yorkshire area, Carol Chaffey initially started making celebration cakes for family and friends as a sideline. Her reputation was such that within a few years she was producing cakes and gateaux commercially for local restaurants and pubs.   Carol and her father established Carols Celebration Cakes (CCC) in 1996 in Accrington, Lancashire at a corner unit on Accrington High Street and were forced to move to more substantial existing premises in 2000.  Company's production line and offices are now based in Blackburn and the annual revenue at the present time is in the region of £1,200,000 with net profit estimated nominally at 10%.  CCC makes celebration cakes for supermarkets and department stores throughout Europe.  These are 'home made' shrink-wrapped individual portion of cakes. 

 

Carol Chaffey herself leads the sales team which consists of eleven members including Carol.  Ten sales representatives spend most of their time visiting clients to present new products, special prices and deals, and receiving orders.  Carol on the other hand is based at Blackburn and most of her time is spent dealing with members of her team usually by telephone although they have briefing on every morning.  The idea of attending a meeting every morning is not particularly popular among the sales team and in particular with five of the members that live in Preston and need to commute.  All special prices and promises made with regard to expected delivery time need to be approved by Carol.  A number of factors such as quantity in stock, pending orders, acquisition of raw ingredients, supplier's lead time, and expected machine down time for maintenance influence Carol's decisions.  According to Carol this is no easy task and one that would have been impossible if it wasn't for John, Adam, and Dharmesh who have been with CCC for at least three years now and Carol tends to rely on them for a considerable amount of information that they provide.  These three also tend to deal with majority of queries from their respective team members.

 

The expansion of business has led to an inevitable increase in paperwork. In order to cope, an experienced administrator/accounts clerk was employed, and a desktop computer was purchased along with the requisite accounts and payroll software. Carol knowing little about computers,  signed up on a computing course, run at the local technical college. The course covered typical office software but also included sessions on using the Internet for business.  During these sessions Carol was interested to see examples of companies similar to hers in size, business nature, and customer/supplier relationships.  The course happened to coincide with the company's move to a new telephone system with the local cable company. As part of the telephone package for small business clients the cable company provided low cost dial-up Internet access, together with 5 ‘free’ e-mail addresses and 60 Mb of web space on their business server. Carol with the help of her brother Paul, set about creating a web site along with their other tasks.   The web-site is primarily used to advertise CCC and although no record of visits are made, Paul estimates the site accounts for about 5 orders per month. Forays into the use of Java and other web page enhancements have led to problems including the site being inaccessible for a number of periods in 2001.

 

CCC's customers usually only deal with large bakeries and they order their products via Internet based EDI systems.  There is tremendous amount of pressure that is placed on the company by its customers to embark on a plan of investment to enable more efficient ways of doing business.  They are particularly frustrated by the need for the sales personnel to receive acknowledgement from Carol herself before he can close a deal.  Sometimes Carol is not available in which case a message is left for her to which she attends upon her return.  Response is usually made within the day though.  CCC's suppliers are also geared to receiving orders online and providing their customers with a considerable amount of information online that comes particularly handy when Carol needs to make quick decisions with regard to orders and special deals.  In particular, she is provided with username and password to one of the supplier's Website.  When she logs in, she is straight away provided with all product information (prices, special prices, availability, ingredients, etc) that she usually orders and she finds that this saves her a lot of time.  She also finds that products tend to be a little bit cheaper if orders are placed online.

 

Although the specialised celebration cake production has now become the major part of CCC's turnover, Carol is also considering establishing an online shop to service consumers throughout UK.   Plans are that customers would place their orders online, and that the system would accept online payment by credit card.

 

SECTION 1       Answer two questions from this Section.

 

1.         (20 marks)

The factors that will influence level of ambition of an e-Business for its use of the web are:

 

·                     market conditions governed by competitive actions

·                     the e-Business audience's use of the Internet

·                     the attitudes and vision of the organisation's management.

 

            The lowest "level of ambition" is to "wait and see".

 

a.         Identify the other five levels of ambition. (10 marks)

b.         Assuming CCC is NOT going to "wait and see", discuss and justify the level of ambition you think CCC should adopt in relation to e-marketing.  Use examples of activities in CCC at that level that demonstrate it is acting at that level of ambition. (10 marks)

 

2.         (20 marks)

a.         Explain what are meant by the terms "the learning organisation" and "organisational intelligence". (6 marks)

b.         Discuss how CCC could become a learning organisation. (7 marks)

c.         Discuss how CCC could use its organisational intelligence. (7 marks)

 

 

3.         (20 marks)

a.         Explain what the terms "tacit knowledge," "explicit knowledge" and "background knowledge" mean. (6 marks)

b.         Discuss how CCC could use tacit knowledge to take advantage of the e-Business opportunity. (4 marks)

c.         Discuss how CCC could use explicit knowledge to take advantage of the e-Business opportunity. (4 marks)

d.         Discuss how CCC could use background knowledge to take advantage of the e-Business opportunity. (6 marks)

 

4.         (20 marks)

Below is a diagram of knowledge management framework.  One of the activities in this framework is "Knowledge Identification" which represents the effort of the e-Business to trace data, information, knowledge, and know-how that exists inside the organisation and outside in the e-Business' environment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a.         Describe each of the remaining five activities by giving the name and description of the role of each activity. (10 marks)

b.         Discuss a simple example of each of the 5 activities in CCC. (10 marks)

 

Section 2         Answer three questions from this Section

 

1.         (20 marks)

In a B2B strategy, CCC is bound to opt for communicating electronically with its business partners. Two of the options for broad networks of supply and demand are Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technology and Extranet Technology. Briefly discuss, compare and contrast these two options in relation to the technology, the architecture, the potential benefits and the drawbacks to CCC and its business partners.

 

 

2.         (20 marks)

If CCC is considering online retailing, it needs to make sure that sensitive information such as a credit card number is transmitted using secure channels of communication .  Public Key Infrastructure is designed to ensure the four cornerstones of online security.

a.         Identify these four cornerstones. (8 marks)

b.         Use examples from the CCC case study to explain briefly the cornerstones. (12 marks)

 

 

3.         (20 marks)

Produce a use case diagram for the University Library system, described below.

 

University Library System

This is a Web-based system for administering loans of books.  Both students and staff may borrow and reserve books.  All users may register online and  they are authenticated before they can reserve books and look up the books they have on loan however there is no need for logging in if users want to look up the catalogue.  Only library staff can issue loans.  At the time of issue, admin staff have to make sure that user does not have overdue books in which case the loan would be refused.

 

 

4.         (20 marks)

When we design a client-server architecture we need to decide which functionalities should be implemented on the client, and which on the server.

a.         Discuss factors that impact design of Web-based client server architectures. (10 marks)

b.         With reference to the CCC case study and appropriate technologies, describe briefly three client-side functionalities and three server-side functionalities. (10 marks)

 

 

5.         (20 marks)

A domain name that CCC may use for their online shop could be WWW.CCC.CO.UK.

a.         What are domain name and domain name service? (4 marks)

b.         What are the domains in the domain name, WWW.CCC.CO.UK? (6 marks)

b.         With reference to these domains and with the aid of a diagram, present and explain the hierarchical organisation of the domains. (10 marks)