E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS MODEL IN LARGE COMPANIES: AN EMPIRICAL VALIDATION

To better understand the strategic value that e-business applications bring to companies, it is necessary to have a classification model based on a theoretical framework. This study aims to propose a classification model of e-business applications based on Porter's value chain and on data collected from corporate portals of large companies that do businesses in Chile. For this purpose a latent class analysis was carried out, a subset of the structural equation model that is used to find segments in multivariate categorical data and that relates a set of observed variables with a set of latent variables. The results of the analysis indicate eight areas where the main e-business applications are located: recruitment and selection, financial and corporate structure, detail of the product and service of the company, products or service marketing, organization's geographic data, after-sales service channels, organization location, and customer information gathering. In addition to establishing a new classification of e-business applications, the main contribution of the study refers to the indication of patterns where companies can focus their efforts to strengthen organizational areas that lack automation and generate competitive advantages.