Evaluation and improvement of proactive customer notification in e-commerce environment

The Internet, and thus e-commerce, both Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B), has changed the way companies do business with each other and communicate with their customers. Because of the speed of the Internet, information transfer both among companies and between a company and its customers has become faster, albeit technologically more complex, in the e-commerce era. It has been a challenge for e-companies to develop creative, satisfying ways of communicating with their customers. After all, the Internet is approximately a decade old, and there has not been enough accumulation of knowledge about customer behavior. Unlike in conventional shopping where the customer takes the product with him/her or makes specific delivery arrangements in a specific geographical zone, in e-commerce the customer picks a specific delivery method from literally anywhere in the world at any time. This, of course, brings many logistical challenges for a successful delivery. Dell Computer Corporation, famous for its build-to-order and direct model, is one of the biggest e-commerce companies in the world and, thus, faces the challenges that any e- commerce company must confront, such as communicating with customers efficiently in a timely manner. Therefore, such logistical challenges that the e-commerce era has brought are not unique to Dell. One such challenge is effective communication with the customer after a shipment is just processed. This thesis focuses on finding best-of-breed technologies and applications in the proactive customer notification field through benchmarking.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Kaya, Ömür Sedat

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles Fine and Kamal Youcef-Toumi.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Mechanical Engineering.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34855

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34855