e-business Models  «Prev 

Examples of Catalog hubs

An example of Catalog hub might include a site that is a marketplace for scientific products used by
  1. pharmaceutical,
  2. chemical,
  3. biotechnology,
  4. industry, and
  5. educational organizations
worldwide. Its mission might be to reduce customers' procurement costs, while increasing researchers productivity.

Features of a Catalog Hub

This site might offer its customers the following:
  1. Extensive laboratory products and supply chain management expertise
  2. Exclusive product listings
  3. A portfolio of eProcurement solutions
  4. A sales and marketing channel

eProcurement solutions

Most managers these days are highly mobile and do not have the time to take care of the more mundane aspects of their job like managing their budgets, project costs or orders that have been sitting in their in-boxes for weeks.
In addition, many employees and managers are on flex-time and work from home. Through the use of a SaaS enabled solution, it is easy to enter orders, approve them and manage the entire supply chain of your business while one is mobile.

Marketing

Issues of on-line advertising, marketing strategies and consumer behaviour and cultures. One of the areas in which it impacts particularly is direct marketing. In the past this was mainly door-to door, home parties (like the Tupperware parties) and mail order using catalogues or leaflets. This moved to telemarketing and TV selling with the advances in telephone and television technology and finally developed into e-marketing spawning "CRM" (customer relationship management) data mining and the like by creating new channels for direct sales and promotion.

E-Marketplaces

  1. front end: The portion of an e-seller's business processes through which customers interact, including the seller's portal, electronic catalogs, a shopping cart, a search engine, and a payment gateway
  2. back end: The activities that support online order fulfillment, inventory management, purchasing from suppliers, payment processing, packaging, and delivery
  3. intermediary: A third party that operates between sellers and buyers
When application software packages are required or when non-architected legacy systems must be interfaced with enterprise standard databases, the enterprise data model should control the data transformation and interfacing as a hub for information exchange. Controlling data transformation in data movement requires defining and implementing appropriate audit and control routines to assure proper extract, handling, and loading.
Data transformation requiring control includes attributes with different data definitions (Web visitor to customer), different formats (person name [free form] to person first name, middle name, first surname, last surname), and/or different data value sets (M [male] and F [female] = 1 and 2, respectively).
Most extract, correct, transform, and load (ECTL) software handles record counts satisfactorily, but few handle control total balancing and value transformation control balancing well. Content control audits generally must be defined and built as separate controls embedded in the ETL job streams. Data control, tagging, or tracking techniques assure data are moved and transformed properly across redundant databases.
Periodically assess information quality characteristics of timeliness (of data propagation) and consistency of data that should be equivalent in the multiple databases. Assess information quality by extracting sample records in the record-of-origin database. Assess them for completeness, accuracy, and nonduplication. Then extract the counterpart records in the downstream databases and measure for "equivalent" values, (gender code value of 'M' in one database is a value of '1' in the downstream database) to assure that no corruption has taken place in the data movement.