Impact of E-Commerce on Operations Management

Operations management has had to deal with a new type of business management in a business world that is vastly changing with new technology. Operations managers have had to adjust and retool how business is done since the inception of e-commerce. The impact that e-commerce has had on how an operations manager address a situation can vary from extreme to barely noticeable. Management has also had to learn how to adopt new technology with the growing e-commerce world. This has brought obstacles and resolutions within a business. E-commerce has also allowed businesses to grow where before the business would be limited to the area that surrounded the business. E-commerce has helped shape the operations management field over the last few decades. An operations manager is defined as the following: the design, execution, and control of operations that convert resources into desired goods and services, and implement a company’s business strategy (Operations, 2011). Then we have e-commerce or electronic commerce which is defined as business conducted through the use of computers, telephones, fax machines, or other electronic appliances without the exchange of paper-based documents (E-Commerce, 2011). Operations management has been around for a long time while e-commerce is still in its infancy. E-commerce has only been around since the 1970’s and really did not start taking off until the 1990’s. For operations managers the usual duties before e-commerce were: preparing program budgets, facilitating programs around the company, controlling the inventory, handling logistics, and interviewing candidates and supervising employees (Ops, 2010). In the e-commerce world many of these duties are still performed; however e-commerce has allowed for more streamlined work and less of the old duties of operations managers. E-commerce is changing manufacturing systems from a mass production to a demand-driven system (Gunasekaran, 2011). For example, for an operations manager at a