When most people hear the term e-business, they immediately think of e-commerce. And although enabling your customers to purchase your products and services on-line is certainly a big part of e-business, it's really only one piece of the e-business puzzle. In order to fully web-enable your business, you must consider many of your other basic business processes, like purchasing, accounts receivable, inventory management and sales force automation. When the above five components of e-business are combined to support these critical applications, you are truly doing e-business.

Whether you elect to do it yourself, or have a consultant involved, developing an overall e-business plan is a good idea. We're not advocates of taking months, or even weeks, to build an elaborate and costly e-business plan. The Internet is changing the rules of business so quickly that by the time you complete your plan, there's a good chance the rules will have changed again. Also, the longer it takes you to launch your e-business, the more time your competitors will have had to launch theirs. So if you haven't developed an overall e-business plan yet, our advice is to keep it simple and get started today.

e-business opens the door for a whole new way of doing business. Here are some examples that you may have not considered:

• Allowing your clients to review and update their accounts online, or submit customer service requests via an online form.

• Enabling your clients and project teams to access and work on project plans and specifications through an Internet connection so that everyone can collaborate and work on the latest project version.

• Creating a system where your sales force can access and manage contact information, sales leads, proposals, pricing data, competitive information, and sales presentations, using an Internet browser like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

• Purchasing supplies from your suppliers using software that allows your company to submit and track orders over the Internet and then manage and account for purchasing receipts.