e-Economy: The challenge facing companies today

First of all, Internet, and the new information and communication technologies in general, have a major impact on companies' transaction costs. Companies' search costs have been reduced in a whole range of industries as Internet has made it easier to identify suppliers, partners, customers or products. It has also made markets more transparent, as there are more possibilities for comparing prices. Coordination costs have also been reduced, a trend that started a few years ago with the introduction of EDI (Electronic Data Exchange) or the implementation of ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning Systems) in companies, and which is now complemented with a series of systems, the most visible of which is perhaps the e-mail, and, in general, with a growing flow of communications through Internet. Finally, Internet also impacts on supervision costs, for instance by making it easier to track orders through the Internet, monitor production batches over a period of time, etc.