Adoption of extranet in SCM: significance and drawbacks: a case study of two companies

Abstract: In recent times, extranet has been used extensively in SCM by business firmswith exchange partners to achieve operating efficiency. And organizationalfactors play a pivotal role to fully acknowledge the benefits of extranet inSCM to achieve this efficiency. The purpose of our study is to gain a betterunderstanding of extranet adoption in SCM and to find out the benefits anddrawbacks of the extranet adoption. Our study showed with empirical data oftwo company's (LKAB, Sweden and DHL, Bangladesh unit) that there is a directrelationship between organizational factors and extranet adoption.Organizational factors should be taken into consideration actively to see and measure how these factors are affecting the adoption processes to calibrate organizational practices to gain utmost benefits. The extranet investigated differed from what the literature suggested on many points. One of the features that has been revealed from the study that LKAB did not perceive most of the extranet benefits, and the reason is that LKAB has only few fixed customers and they used their extranet system as a supplementary services to their core businesses. On the other hand, DHL made the extranet system as their core business process: thus acknowledging most of the benefits in a positive way. Extranet has the potential to provide far more benefits to companies than they perceive and it is changing faster than the literature emerges. Technological improvements offset major disadvantages that once researchers considered obstacle to extranet implementation. Our research indicated that all members of the company, from top management personnel to first level employees should have the positive mindsets to adapt to contemporary developments in technology to reap the maximum benefits of extranet.