Business Use of the Internet

Business use of the internet has expanded from an electronic information exchange to a broad platform for strategic business applications.

Notice how applications like collaboration among business partners, providing customer and vendor support, and electronic commerce have become major business uses of the internet.

Other studies of leading corporations and organizations show that they are also using Internet technologies for marketing, sales, and customer relationship management applications.

However, these studies also show that the strong growth of cross functional business applications and the emergence of applications in engineering, manufacturing, human resource, and accounting. Companies are using the Internet for business in a variety of ways, including enterprise communications and collaborations, electronic commerce, and strategic business alliance.

At General Electric Co. for example customers and designers can use intranets, extranets, the internet, and project collaborations technology to help construct a power plant from the ground up to the web.

General Electric and customer engineers can now hold virtual meeting in which blueprints can be exchanged and manipulated in real time. Then customers can use the web to watch from anywhere in the world as a turbine is built and moves down the production lines, ordering at last minute changes as needed.

While General Electric’s new system should give the company a 20% and 30% reduction in the time it takes to built a turbine and could improve the annual output of each turbine by 1% to 2%. This is one of competitive advantage.
Business Use of the Internet