An extranet can offer a range of benefits to your organisation. Of course these can depend to a large degree on your reasons for introducing the extranet in the first place.

However, the types of benefit that organisations using extranets typically experience include:

• Help in joining up the supply chain through the use of online ordering, order tracking and inventory management.
• Reducing costs by making manuals and technical documentation available online to trading partners and customers.
• Enabling collaboration between business partners - perhaps members of a project team - by enabling them to work online on common documentation. This can speed up the development and approval processes and reduce the need for meetings.
• Helping to improve business relationships with key trading partners because of the close collaborative working that extranets support.
• Improving customer service by giving customers direct access to information and enabling them to resolve their own queries. Increasing customer satisfaction with your service.
• Providing a single user interface between you and your business partners.
• Improving the security of communications between you and your business partners, since exchanges can take place under a controlled and secure environment such as a virtual private network.
• Sharing news of product development exclusively with partner companies - cost-effectively without print, and distribution costs.
• Assisting in the move towards flexible working for your own staff, as an extranet allows remote and mobile staff to access core business information on an as-required basis, irrespective of location - encouraging staff retention.