M.Sc. (Computer Science) / As the world enters the new millennium, we are experiencing one of the most important changes since the industrial revolution - the move to an Internet-based society. Traditional business channels are moving to a new platform of interaction that is called Electronic Business (EB). Electronic Business is becoming a significant business tool, provided that businesses understand the benefits, the application areas and impacts of EB, and can apply these concepts optimally. The problem with many businesses, especially SMMEs (Small Medium and Micro Enterprises), is that they are ignorant to many EB-related concepts, how EB can assist their business needs, and how to apply EB into their business components. Various solutions for EB exist in the industry, which are very comprehensive and complex. However, with the constant wave of mergers, acquisitions and new IT-companies forming, as well as the myriad of new solutions being developed, many businesses are not sure which solution would suit their business best, and which solution provider would be the best to approach. What businesses need is an understanding of EB and guidelines on how to start becoming EB focused. The principle aim of the Enterprise-Wide Electronic Business (EWEB) Framework developed is to form the bridge between a traditional business and an electronic business. This is achieved by defining many EB-related concepts and providing guidelines on how to streamline business processes with technology in moving to an EB platform. The EWEB Framework targets this from three perspectives. Firstly, the EWEB Framework follows a top-down approach to EB, targeting business processes across the enterprise as well as business issues from strategic, architectural and infrastructural levels. This allows EWEB to be applicable to all types of business processes and businesses needs. Secondly, the EWEB Framework also consists of business processes that are common across all industries. This allows EWEB to be applicable to all types of businesses...

Over the decades, as organizations begin to move globally there has been a sporadic flow of information in their supply chain. Competition today is forcing companies to integrate tightly with their suppliers and customers, in order to reduce the time available to flex the supply chain (SC) (Koh S.C, Saad S, Arunachalam S, 2006). The integration of firms and departments and information is getting more and more complicated. Regardless of enterprise system solutions being introduced as “integrated suites” they have failed to accomplish application and supply chain integration (Themistocleous, M. Irani, Z. O‟Keefe, and R. 2001). Therefore, this thesis aims to explore, gain better understanding and to explain the balance that may occur between the challenges and benefits gained from integrating enterprise resource planning and supply chain management.Our topic of interest could be view from both developers and user perspective. Developer/consultant‟s perspective is based on the viewpoint of those involved in and responsible for developing enterprise solutions. User‟s perspective, this perspective gives insight to how the integration process is perceived by organisations actually using the solutions. We chose the User perspective because we consider the user to be the direct beneficiary of whatever outcome is gotten from both the business solutions and its integration.In order to achieve a purposeful thesis. We decided to use an interpretive perspective which focus on exploring and gaining insight into issues of integrating enterprise system solution. We used both the inductive and the deductive approaches in our research. This would be advantageous due to the nature of our research topic, as there is little existing knowledge about the integration of enterprise systems solution within supply chain and there are lots of literatures related to the enterprise system solutions (ERP and SCM) been observed. The inductive approach would guide us to choose one or a few specific interactions to explore in-depth, while the deductive approach would aid us when making an hypothesis, since we would be collecting ideas about previous research and theories in order to guide us and make comparison.Conclusively, we found that the balance between challenges and benefits of ERP and SCM are unequivocal, as the benefits surpass the challenges and the effect of challenges on organisation‟s benefit is that it prolongs the short term benefit.