Although their bigger suppliers may still prefer older systems, the new extranet will solicit bids for customised components and allow smaller suppliers to join in obliterating many of the anti-competitive worries that IT raised only a few years ago.
Indeed, new ones are being introduced, such as FX Connect, part of Global Link, an "extranet" run by State Street, an American bank that leads the world in providing custody services.
EVERY day Cisco Systems, acme of the new-economy corporate model, posts its requirements for components on an extranet, a dedicated Internet-based network that connects the company to 32 manufacturing plants.
Similarly, if an intranet or an extranet fails, employees may not be able to get their work done, or outside partners may not be able to do business with your supply chain.
But by last year he was posting them on the Internet -- in this case, an "extranet," a private network.
In suburban Chicago, CDW Computer Centers uses the extranet to help its telephone sales force project that "personal touch" once reserved for face-to-face encounters.
Mr. Morse said the organization might also build an extranet, or password-protected Web site, so its grant recipients can communicate more effectively with each other and with the Pew trusts.
"In effect," she writes, "Dell posts its actual manufacturing schedule on a private extranet -- a walled-off bit of the Internet -- for suppliers".
Mr. Lagan of J. A. Jones said his company had cut the response time to a subcontractor's request for information to 24 hours from 10 days after installing an extranet system -- a limited access Internet site -- which details who has seen each item and when.
By using the Internet's technology to establish secure, standing information links between companies, extranets have helped firms reach far more suppliers: all one needs is a PC, a modem and surfing software.Japan Airlines JALL) has used the Internet to post orders for in-flight materials, such as plastic cups.
By elaborating the Net (beefing it up with encryption technology, for example, and using more reliable telephone links), firms have built "extranets" to do many of the things that they used to do through expensive proprietary systems.
