Although e-commerce has become a common basis for business transactions in most markets, other elements of e-business are not as widely used yet. This paper extends and operationalizes a previously developed e-business process model by Basu and Muylle (2007). Specifically, it presents evaluation measures for each process and an instrument based on those measures, and describes an effective approach to assess firms’ e-business capabilities. The assessment approach is illustrated using data from a diverse collection of firms in the Flanders region of Belgium. This is followed by an illustration of how such assessments can assist firms in identifying e-business initiatives in line with strategic and market priorities, using a subset of the firms as examples.

This case study focuses on a key aspect of supply management: supplier evaluation. The case is set at Group Deutsche Borse (GDB) and describes how GDB changed its sourcing strategy for external services between 2000 and 2006. In addition to describing the state of preferred supplier management and evaluation at GDB in 2006, the case study invites the reader to: (1) assess this supplier evaluation model, and (2) develop an improved model for defining and managing the preferred supplier list for external services. Furthermore, the case considers supplier evaluation within the broader context of a sourcing strategy development process.

In the summer of 2006, some conflicts arose between the emergency department (ED) and some of the internal nursing departments (INDs) of Ghent University Hospital. The ED staff did not understand why the CEO had communicated a message about the low occupancy rate of the beds in the hospital, because he had been confronted for some years with the phenomenon of access blocking in the ED. Furthermore, the ED staff had evidence of the fact that the access of patients from the ED to the INDs was being blocked even though there were free beds in these nursing departments. As a consequence, the ED regularly became overcrowded, which led to an unacceptable workload for the ED staff. Therefore, the CEO and the hospital's chief of medicine invited Dr Paul De Meester - Professor of Health Care Management - to discuss the matter. Dr De Meester understood that this issue was not only an 'ED' problem, but a complex hospital-wide problem. Nevertheless, Dr De Meester was asked to come up with a solution. Fortunately, a lot of data had been gathered, which allowed Paul De Meester to make several well-founded recommendations.