B2E Management (Business to Employee)

Many businesses exert effort to sell outside of the company, whether to other businesses, individual consumers, public organizations, or governments. However, there is another type of selling that companies are beginning to find more attractive, especially large companies, and this is B2E, or business-to-employee selling. This involves selling products and services within the company, advertising to employees through such in-company applications as intranets and e-mail. Often, special discounts or deals are extended to employees to encourage them to buy from the company. B2E enterprise can also refer to the spread of information and helpful services among employees to encourage overall company growth.

COMMON FORMS OF B2E

In the nonprofit services category, B2E initiatives usually fall into two groups that function as online applications over the company's intranet or Internet interface. The first group is mostly concerned with human resource (HR) functions, offering employees many types of opportunities and information. Updates concerning health care possibilities, payroll, and other types of compensation are included in this group, along with all types of online corporate training. The spread of company-wide messages or announcements also belong to the first set. The second group includes more extended types of employee benefits, such as travel reservations, compensation for certain types of employee expenses, credit services, and insurance management.

A separate type of nonprofit B2E services allows employees to access specialized portals containing necessary information for them and their tasks. This can include data, data mining operations, and certain searches that are available only to specific employees. There can also be meta-services that allow analysts to collect data on which employees use B2E services, which opportunities are most selected by the employees, and which services are the most successful.

ADVANTAGES TO B2E

There are many benefits for employees and organizations resulting from B2E practices. Employees—through participation and awareness—often increase their efficiency and overall ability to collaborate; they prove more willing to invest in the company and offer creative solutions for problems their business may encounter. B2E initiatives often lead to a logical increase in loyalty and satisfaction among the workforce, a movement directly related to awareness and availability of company services. The companies will benefit from B2E actions by saving on costs associated with interruption of data and a paper-oriented communication structure. Since B2E depends on online interaction, copying and distributing flyers, updates, or files is rarely necessary. B2E is also associated with a number of intranet networking applications, such as virtual teams and company wikis.

B2E portals and applications offer employees many of the same advantages online customers have, but are applied to their benefits at work. For instance, an important B2E tool can be a home page designed specifically for an employee. The employee can use their homepage to: access sites, files, and resources meant specifically for them; manage their health care options; explore other types of insurance the company offers; apply for expense

compensation; and review other features tailored to fit their needs. Such sites and applications may also include products or services of the company, made available at reduced cost for the employee. Any other data can be included in the employee portal to aid employees in collaboration and decisions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahonen, Tommy T, and Joe Barrett. Services for UMTS. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2002.

Dunford, Ian. “B2E: The Future Looks Rosy.” Infomatics. October 23, 2002.

Polgar, Jana, Robert Mark Bram, and Anton Polgar. Building and Managing Enterprise-Wide Portals. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2005.

Rahim, Mahbubur. “Understanding Adoption and Impact of B2E E-Business Systems: Lessons Learned from the Experience of an Australian University.” Monash University, 2006. Available from: http://www.collecter2006.unisa.edu.au/Paper%202%20Md%20Mahbubur%20Rahim.pdf.

Simon, Alan R., and Steven L. Shaffer. Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for E-commerce. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2001.