PurposeThe paper aims to determine and assess the cost positions that mostly impact the company total cost efficiency in supply chain management under theoretical and empirical background.Design/methodology/approachIn the paper, the systemic and logical analysis of e‐commerce expert research made over the past several years was used. For the empirical research, the data of a wholesale company cost structure and processes management was used.FindingsMajor findings allow stating that e‐commerce adoption in business has a positive impact on business efficiency in several areas. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of e‐commerce impact on business efficiency shows that the main cost positions, which directly depend on e‐commerce adoption and use, and experience quite big changes, are average cost of inventory management, the cost of materials ordering process, and the cost of labour.Research limitations/implicationsThe presented empirical research confirms the theoretical implications of e‐commerce impact on business efficiency. Using this information, the future research should be made on evaluation of indirect e‐commerce impact on business efficiency.Practical implicationsThe empirical research of e‐commerce adoption in a wholesale company confirms that the main areas where e‐commerce has an important positive impact on business efficiency are the cost of inventory management, the cost of materials ordering process and the cost of labour.Originality/valueThe e‐commerce impact on business result analysis is improved by detailed costs, which depend on e‐commerce adoption, analysis and definition of e‐commerce impact on business results, by evaluating the business efficiency in quantitative and qualitative forms.

The prediction of companies' crisis and assessment of crisis probability is an important theoretical and practical problem which is being analyzed by various authors from finance, business administration and law perspectives. Various authors have presented different models for company's crisis identification, but most of them are based on the quantitative assessment of financial ratios. Such models have a limited usability because the lack of factors assessed in case of small and medium companies. In SMEs sector the company's crisis identification is specific because of the nature of SMEs business management which creates the strong dependability of business results on human resources and environmental factors. In this study the set of qualitative and quantitative factors is proposed to support the development of company's crisis identification models for SMEs. The proposed set of criteria allows identification of the real situation in the company regarding not only the financial statements but also a wide variety of factors related to company's management capabilities, competencies of human resources, possible impact of internal and external environmental factors and other important non-quantitative aspects. The prosed set of criteria might be used for the development of company's crisis identification model which would help to forecast the possible company's crisis in SMEs sector.