Porter's E-Commerce Model

The aim of this write-up is the logistics consequences of the development of E-commerce concerning physical products. The cost will be analyzed with a Supply Chain view and the perspective from the transport and logistics providers. An e-commerce model is created by a number of different logistic forces. The model has emerged out of the competitive forces model by Porter. This e-commerce model is demonstrated by a number of examples. Here the model is used to indicate the way the logistics industry will be positioned in the future. To analyze the case studies the model is used. The model shows distinctly the way the five competitive forces influences the e-commerce companies as well as the logistics industry. This facilitates for the logistics

Handfield and Nichols define Supply Chain Management to be “…the integration of these activities [activities associated with the flow an transformation of goods from the raw material stage, through to the end use, as well as the associated information flows] through improved supply chain relationships, to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.” Essentially the supply chain includes internal and external process and information flows. In general, a company or a business unit has control only over the internal processes and the external processes can only be influenced to certain extent. In this analysis, we concentrate only on internal processes and inter-organization information flows. The methodology developed is still applicable for an integrated supply chain but requires significant work to achieve consensus across all the nodes that are being integrated to agree upon the results. We divide the internal supply chain by product life cycle (only the SCM categories are shown in below figure). At every level of the internal supply chain there is an opportunity to participate in inter-organization information flow. However, many businesses would not share information during the product/service generation

After production, and possibly storage at the factory, the goods are delivered to the national distribution center (DC). Here they are stored, consolidated and reloaded, and then sent on to the next stop, the local DC. The goods are handled in the same way as at the national DC, and are thereafter sent on to the retailer, where they are sold to the customer. Since most of the time that goods spend at nodes does not add value, the more nodes there are in a distribution channel the less efficient it generally is (Lumsden,