Advantages of Extranets for Businesses

Advantages of extranets for businesses are not limited to the increase in efficiency and overall business performance. A well designed and properly planned extranet system will lead the business to stay ahead of its competitors, far away.

What is an extranet? Why should businesses consider using an extranet and what are the benefits it brings to businesses?

Advantages of Extranets for Businesses

To put in simple terms, an extranet is a network link that uses the internet technologies to interconnect the customers, suppliers, consultants, contractors and subcontractors, and business partners of a specific business.

In other words, an extranet is similar to an intranet but it is made accessible to selected external partners for exchanging data and applications, and sharing of information.

It is one of the ways for a business to build and strengthen strategic relationship with its external partners (such as customers and suppliers).

Let’s look at why should we implement extranets in the first place:

It is becoming more common practices nowadays that businesses of all sizes are using online ordering, electronic order tracking and inventory management.

Larger companies are putting more demand to their vendors and suppliers in terms of working flexibly, adopting new technologies and enabling the exchange of business information and transactions.

Extranets comes to fill the demand by offering a cheap and efficient way for businesses to connect with their trading partners. With extranets, communications and access to the information businesses need could happen 24/7.

The ability of the extranet to automate the trading tasks between a business and its trading partners can lead to enhanced business relationships and help to integrate the business firmly within its supply chain.

Listed below are some of the advantages of extranets for businesses in keypoints:

* Increase productivity
* Improve business relationships
* Reduced error margins
* Flexibility
* On-demand and real time information
* Shorter decision making time

Advantages of Extranets for Businesses

With the availability of the access to the system and important information 24/7, the overall efficiency and productivity are sure to be increased.

Because of the close collaborative working that extranets support, business relationships among connected parties are to become closer and better.

When connected parties can access and exchange information in real-time or on-demand, the margins of error could be reduced. By making manuals and technical documentation available online to trading partners and customers, a business could reduce costs with the extranet too.

As long as the system is supported with a strong team both in hardware and software investment, and skilled technical support team, the near 100% up time (~99.99%) will make it very flexible for the staff, as an extranet allows remote and mobile staff to access core business information 24 hours a day, irrespective of location (access anytime, anywhere).

Last but not least, with first hand information on your costing and overhead, you are definitely able to make a better judgement and decision in your marketing campaigns, thus outperform your competitor easily.

Unlike benefits of intranets to business, the advantages of using extranets are enjoyed by all the parties that are connected, which does not restricted to internal business entity or personnel.

It is foreseeable that in the near future, as more and more information will be put on the company’s web enabled systems and applications, the usage or implementation of extranets will be more common and more process will be added to the information into knowledge of each parties related to the business.

Extranet will become one of the important vehicle to deliver updates of information between the business and external partners.

As a conclusion, with so many advantages of extranets for businesses, there is no reason why a business would not consider implement the extranet for its operation.

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