E-commerce Assignment

Bridgewater Engineering Company (BECO), a privately held machine shop, makes industrial-quality, heavy-duty machinery for assembly lines in other factories. It sells its presses, grinders, and milling equipment using a few inside salespeople and telephones. This traditional approach worked well during the company's start-up years, but BECO is getting a lot of competition from abroad. Because you worked for the company during the summers of your college years, BECO's president, Tom Dalton, knows you and realizes that you are Web savvy. He wants to form close relationships with the steel companies and small-parts manufacturers that are BECO's suppliers so that he can tap into their ordering systems and request supplies when he needs them. Tom wants you to investigate how he can use the Internet to set up such electronic relationships. Use the Web and the links in the Chapter 2 Word document you downloaded from the Online Companion to locate information about extranets and VPNs.

1. Using Word, write a report that briefly describes how companies use extranets to link their systems with those of their suppliers
2. Then write an evaluation of at least two companies (using information you have gathered in your Web searches) that could help develop an extranet that would work for Tom.
3. Close the report with an overview of how BECO could use VPN technologies in this type of extranet.