A framework to develop an enterprise information portal for contract manufacturing

The development of enterprise information portals is a costly initiative. Not only that it costs the company to develop it, it requires significant business process change in order to leverage it for business benefits. It is also required to support business strategy. Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources and expertise are not capable of developing them solely by themselves. A viable way to leverage the opportunity is either to participate in the e-business portals emerging over the Internet or to progressively make use of web-based platform to adopt new technologies that alter their business processes. Doing it this way enables the actual business value to be locked inside the changed business process and facilitates the flexibility inherited with the Internet, Extranet and Intranet. This paper reviews and summarizes the existing e-business portals widely available to SMEs and explores their limitations on SMEs as the market dynamics shifts. The concept of contract manufacturing is articulated to incorporate putting outsourcing for collaboration into a firm's strategic agenda. This supports the current thinking of creating an extended enterprise in manufacturing making uses of IT tools to increase responsiveness, A case study is used to explain how contract manufacturing works and to articulate the importance of decision support and business alignment. A framework is proposed to broaden the perspective in the adoption of a networked infrastructure as a platform to progressively link up technologies with business process to support manufacturing in creating value and creating customers. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.