Communicating efficiently and effectively with both employees and your customers, clients, and partners can be a difficult and expensive task. So how can these management areas be monitored and streamlined in one location? A well-maintaned extranet can boost the reputation of your organization, change your organization's relationships with trusted parties, and be a first step to encouraging flexible working through the provision of secure access by mobile and home workers to corporate IT resources.

American Gypsum
American Gypsum contacted Starkmedia to build an exclusive internet portal where their 800 plus customers could access their most current account information 24 hours a day.

Starkmedia built a customer extranet that incorporated their current branding efforts and collateral design. This password-protected site, allows customers to access their order history, pricing data, volume reports and shipping schedules. An online survey tool was added to glean important information for marketing and customer service research. Promotional announcements can also be added to the extranet site to encourage repeat visits to the site and more interaction between American Gypsum and its customers.

Some advantages of an extranet include:

• Boost Productivity
  Automating processes that have been done manually will increase your company's productivity. Critical information won't get buried in the mail or inbox, and busy employees won't miss key events. An extranet can monitor projects and serve as source of new, important information for internal employees.
• Flexibility
  When you use an extranet to make information and applications available to partners, vendors, clients and customers, everyone can operate when and where it's most convenient. This self-serve approach frees you from unnecessary meetings and phone tag, and it cuts down on the costs associated with in-person information exchanges.
• Timely and Accurate Information
  Instantly release and update sensitive information such as price lists, inventories, or manuals. Compared to typical paper-based publishing processes, an extranet offers a unique opportunity to get hot information into the right hands before it cools and before it's out-of-date.
• Reduced Inventory
  One of the hallmarks of a business-to-business extranet is its impact on supply-chain management. By linking your inventory system directly to a supplier, you can process orders as soon as the system knows you need them, thus reducing the stock you keep on hand and making the procurement process more efficient.
• Client Marketing
  Attract new clients or gain additional business from existing clients. By effectively communicating that you not only provide excellent services and advice, but you do so in a way that makes it much more convenient for the client to use, consume and monitor, you differentiate yourself from competitors.
• Community Building
  Extranets create a community where a shared set of values and purposes is given a new forum. Rather than each of your clients, vendors, employees working through or around each other with the benefit of only partial or third hand instructions, they can all be brought into the same circle and work toward the common goal by the very structure of the site itself.

Whether your aim is to cut costs, automate processes, or improve customer service and business relationships, deploying an extranet solution can be done quickly and securely with the technologies available today at Starkmedia. To find out more about extranet development, call us at 414.226.2710 or contact us.