Plug-and-play capability

Customer expectations and continually increasing competition on a world-wide scale are forcing industry to rethink business strategies, alliances, partnerships and resulting everyday operation. In parallel, recent developments in IT and communications offer significant opportunities for all market sectors to operate in fundamentally different ways than to-date.

Highly intelligent enterprises come to dominate their space. The smarter players will elect to outsource large pieces of their core businesses to superior firms and then recombine the pieces imaginatively to suit specific opportunities - thus creating a modular or plug-and-play capability that is both strong and flexible and that extends their original boundaries.

The Extended Enterprise

The term Extended Enterprise represents the concept that a company is made up not just of its employees, its board members, and executives, but also its business partners, its suppliers, and even its customers. The extended enterprise can only be successful if all of the component groups and individuals have the information they need in order to do business effectively.

An Extended Enterprise is a loosely coupled, self-organizing network of firms that combine their economic output to provide products and services offerings to the market.

The standardization of business processes has permitted companies to purchase as services many of the activities that previously had been provided directly by the firm. By outsourcing certain business functions that had been previously self-provided, such as transportation, warehousing, procurement, public relations, information technology, firms have been able to concentrate their resources on those investments and activities that provide them the greatest rate of return. The remaining "core competencies" determine the firm's unique value proposition.