Ford , a longtime Netscape customer, created a supplier network, which is, I believe, one of the most sophisticated extranets in the world. It links 200,000 suppliers, partners, and dealerships together. Ford is trying to reduce the time it takes to ship cars from 50 days to 15 days. And this winds up saving the company billions of dollars in inventory carrying costs, shipping costs, and dealer costs. It also creates a better relationship with customers.
People hate to wait to receive their orders.
You order something, you want it now. Netscape now offers businesses a customized portal, called Custom Netcenter . The industry trend is moving from a small number of very large portal sites, like Netcenter and Yahoo, to hundreds, or maybe thousands, of custom enterprise portal sites. Ford, for example, can use this to create its own portal site. If you're a Ford supplier, you could go to the Ford customized portal to get all of the news about Ford, its products, current inventory, price lists, and so on, but you could also look at stock market quotations, make airline reservations, and get anything else that a typical portal site offers.