P Process Simulation for E-commerce Systems

INTRODUCTION As a modern way to conduct business in the global economic environment, e-commerce is becoming an essential component integrated with traditional business processes in enterprises. To reduce risks and increase profits in e-commerce investments and to provide the best services to their customers, enterprises have to find appropriate ways to analyze their e-commerce strategies at the business planning stage. Strategic management tools are designed for enterprises to evaluate their business strategies, and can be used to evaluate an e-commerce business plan, as well. For example, the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis is regarded as a popular way to conduct an e-commerce business plan evaluation, with business environmental scanning based on internal environmental factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external environmental factors (opportunities and threats) (Turban, King, Lee, & Viehland, 2003). To facilitate the application of the strategic management tools, different forms of applications are adopted, such as checklist (OGC, 2004), rating system (UNMFS, 2004), expert system (PlanWare, 2004) and so forth. Among these, computer-driven business simulation tools enable participants to run with virtual business processes, experiment with different strategies and compete with other supposed companies or plans in a virtual business environment. As an example, the Marketplace (ILS, 2003; IDC, 2004) is a business simulator for integra-tive business courses that provides decision content, including marketing, product development, sales force management, financial analysis, accounting, manufacturing and quality management. Regarding the application of computer simulation in e-commerce, the Marketplace strategic e-commerce simulation is specifically designed, and it illustrates the business concepts of an e-commerce environment, as well (ILS, 2003). For an e-commerce system simulation, Griss and Letsinger (2000) studied agent-based flexible e-commerce systems with an experimental multi-player shopping game to experiment with alternative individual and group economic strategies, and to evaluate the effectiveness of agent-based systems for e-commerce. Both academic and professional practice have proved that using computer simulation is an effective, efficient and economical way for e-commerce business plan evaluation. However, it is hard to conduct simulation based on the flowchart of business processes within the current e-commerce simulation environment as mentioned above. This actually provides a limitation for applying e-commerce simulation. In fact, computer simulation has tackled a range of business problems, leading to improving efficiency , reduced costs and increased profitability since the 1950s (Robinson, 1994). Simulation tools are on the increase in various application areas (Google, 2005) and process-oriented simulation has been increasing in popularity for …