preview

E Commerce And Its Impact On Waste Management

Decent Essays

According to Pawar and Driva (2000), not every firm is ready to embrace e-commerce as it could lead to serious security, legal and financial problems. Back in early 2000s those hurdles of e-commerce limited the confidence of companies in terms of Internet-based business integration (Prasad et al., 2000). The research by Quayle (2002) revealed that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UK would generally focus on waste management rather than adopting e-commerce. Moreover, some critics even predicted an imminent collapse of e-commerce (Wallace, 2000). Surprisingly for the oppositionists, wide use of e-business initiatives has proved its impact on waste management with the adaption of electronic data interchange, electronic catalogue ordering, e-mail, mobile telephone, direct link-ups with suppliers According to the research in the lean manufacturing conducted by Toyota Production System, companies encounter 7 types of waste in their operations: overproduction, defects, over-processing, inventory, transportation, waiting, motion (El-Namrouty et al., 2013). Different business model of ecommerce companies as opposed to brick-and-motors` enables reduction or elimination of some of those types of waste (reduced paper transactions, shorter order cycle time and the subsequent inventory reduction). The changes result in speedy transmission of information, enhanced supplier/buyer partnership through web communication networks (Gulledge et al., 1998) and cost savings. Moreover, if

Get Access