Making enterprises Internet ready: e‐business for process industries

Discusses the efforts of manufacturing enterprises to make themselves Internet‐ready, to cope with future e‐ business. Changes brought by the Internet will force enterprises to become more agile and responsive. However, the same changes force a need to deploy integrated information systems, and to have business processes in place to facilitate rapid decision‐making, and optimize the extended supply chain by integrating internal business processes with those of business partners. Concludes that e‐business has not yet caused the revolutionary changes in asset‐intensive process industries that it has in information‐based industries.