"Extended Enterprise" Portals

"Extended Enterprise" Portals facilitate the people-to-people enablement associated with optimizing and managing complex customer-supplier relationships.

There's a fine line between what happens "inside", and what happens "outside", the business. Suppliers and partners, increasingly acting directly on behalf of their clients, provide services, manage customers and constituents, and care for critical data and operations — in a near-seamless structure that binds the company and supplier organizations in common purpose and aligned goals.

In this now-common business model, the enterprise is functioning with its partners and suppliers in an "Extended Enterprise" operating model, and the portal that enables these relationships to work every day is known as the "Extended Enterprise" Portal.

"Extended Enterprise" Portals facilitate the people-to-people enablement associated with optimizing and managing these complex customer-supplier relationships. Here, portals enable the continuity of the supply chain, and create a platform for partners to exchange data as well as intelligence. This just-in-time knowledge and collaboration can be a meaningful, if not critical, advantage or operational necessity.

Portals serve as an optimal vehicle for this function. As an integration platform, "Extended Enterprise" Portals sit "on top" of myriad systems and tools, and provide interpretation, intelligence and contextualization to people who manage the partnerships and the overall supply chain. Therefore, access to this portal on a continuous basis, especially with regards to mobile device users, becomes key to the portal's overall effectiveness.

Often "Extended Enterprise" Portals become the daily place where the partnership is operationalized and measured, and where communications and intersecting work practices occur. When these portals work well, it's almost impossible to distinguish who is "inside" and who is "outside" the business...an idea that is generally what the business was expecting, and what is required, when outsourcing critical supply chain components to entrusted partners.