Commercialization of the Internet has been one of the hottest topics around the world in recent years. The growth of this medium and the new capabilities deliverable on the World Wide Web has excited entrepreneurs, transforming some of them into multimillionaires overnight. There has been an explosion of new firms experimenting with “electronic commerce,” or commercial transactions over the Internet. Most of these ventures are in industries, such as the service or publishing industries that rely on information delivery. But what about manufacturing? This topic has been neglected in the popular press and surveys show that many manufacturers are unsure whether the Internet will play an important part in their business.