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November 2000
Equilon Fuels Corporate Intelligence
By Doug Henschen
The challenge was daunting: integrate up to 19 applications,
including document management systems, databases, line-of-business
applications and intranets. The answer was cutting edge: a broadly
deployed platform portal providing personalized, collaborative desktops
with advanced searching and seamless access to applications including
Open Text, Exchange email, SAP and Siebel CRM. The return on investment
will be rapid: anticipated cost savings of $5 million and revenue
enhancements of at least $3 million per year.
The challenge was faced by Equilon Enterprises, an $8 billion,
Houston-based petroleum distributor jointly owned by Shell Oil and
Texaco. Equilon owns and manages a vast network, with 30,000 miles of
pipeline and 69 distribution terminals in 34 states serving more than
13,000 filling stations nationwide. Despite its size, the company must
respond quickly: to changes in the petroleum market, to service demands
from Shell and Texaco, and to the competitive pressure of serving one
out of every six Americans who stop at an Equilon-supplied filling
station each day.
In the wake of a strategic analysis, begun in early 1999 and
aided by Andersen Consulting, Chicago, Equilon recognized that its
information technology infrastructure could not keep pace with
competitive demands. To support rapid decisionmaking, the company wanted
to give its employees easy access to source data and documents, as well
as up-to-date customer and product information. Even more ambitious, the
company wanted to provide measures of performance against industry "best
practices" so that employees at all levels - from truck drivers and
pipeline maintenance crews to white-collar executives - could recognize,
meet and exceed expectations.
While Equilon's board and senior management set high goals, the
company needed a solution that could be deployed quickly and easily
without reinventing the existing technology infrastructure. Internal
development and project management teams were also committed to
simultaneous implementations of SAP, mySAP.com, Siebel CRM and a number
of other applications, so the project had to make due with an internal
team of only five managers.
The demands for integration, customization and ease of deployment
all pointed toward portal technology, and Andersen and the project team
leaders soon zeroed in on the eBusiness Integration Portal from TopTier,
San Jose, CA. TopTier's technology offered the personalization,
security, search and information taxonomy features Equilon's solution
demanded. It also helped that the vendor had a working relationship with
Andersen and a partnership position with SAP in the development of
mySAP.com.
Equilon planned to extend the portal to all end users within the
company's distribution and pipeline management divisions. The interface
would provide a common look and feel for databases and applications
including OpenText document management, SAP, Siebel CRM, an ESRI
Geographic Information System and the mySAP.com workspace. In addition,
the company planned to add alerts, queries, reports and visual business
indicators tied to petroleum industry best practices. Developed with the
help of Andersen, these benchmark measures included petroleum yield,
least-path distribution analysis, alternative routes, inventory turns,
on-time shipments, completed orders and partial fulfillment.
As of late September, the TopTier portal had been rolled out to
more than 500 end users across Equilon's transportation division. The
alerts and visual performance indicators have proven to be particularly
useful, providing a digital dashboard of daily, weekly, monthly, annual
and even minute-by-minute performance.
"The portal puts the right information in the right hands at the
right time," says Robert Stephens, business information manager in
Equilon's transportation division. "This has helped us take the first
step toward setting the performance standards in the pipeline industry."
Equilon's platform portal is not only boosting day-to-day
productivity, the technology is helping to uncover problems and
opportunities by discovering interrelationships between structured and
unstructured information. TopTier's XML-based application integration
engine provides point-and-click wizards that automatically map legacy
applications and data to a common metadata repository. This not only
provides federated searching across multiple sources of information, but
also allows powerful associations to be made directly within the portal
interface.
As an example, if a portal alert indicated a sudden increase in
the price of West Texas crude oil, an Equilon business development
manager could drag-and-drop the alert to the Open Text portal view in
order to discover all customers with contracts for this grade of oil.
The manager could then drag the customer list to the Siebel CRM portal
view to create a list of contacts and to Outlook in order to send an
email blast advising a course of action.
Stephens says Equilon's next step will be to integrate the
mySAP.com Workplace, which will extend the portal to 2,500 additional
users. He adds that portal integration and Web accessibility will save
the company up to $3 million per year over the cost of traditional
application rollouts, which demanded client-based software installs and
more-extensive training.
The company expects a minimum of $2 million in savings attributed
to the portal's ability to send proactive alerts and notifications that
will resolve and preempt service and maintenance issues. Finally, the
discovery of interrelationships between data - as in the pricing example
cited earlier - is expected to yield a minimum of $3 million in
previously unrealized business opportunity.
Equilon/TopTier Portal Named E-Document Winner
Delivering a combination of performance gains, hard-dollar cost
savings and discovered business opportunity, Equilon's TopTier-powered
platform portal was named the best E-Document Solutions Application in
the 2000 RealWare Awards competition. Hosted by CMP's Business
Intelligence Group, which comprises Imaging & Document Solutions and
Intelligent Enterprise magazines and their related online communities,
the RealWare awards recognize outstanding implementations of technology
in the enterprise.
The judges in the E-Document Solutions category were Connie
Moore, a vice president at Giga Information Group, Cambridge, MA; Alan
Pelz-Sharpe, a senior analyst at Ovum, London; and Doug Henschen,
editor-in-chief of Imaging & Document Solutions. The judges deemed the
Equilon/TopTier portal to be the most advanced, impactful and strategic
implementation among the seven submissions in the category.
"Equilon is well along in achieving what a lot of companies are
trying to do," commented Moore. "They're integrating structured and
unstructured information, they're tracking their performance against
industry best practices, and they're implementing a knowledge management
piece to uncover hidden opportunities."
The two other finalists in the E-Document Solutions category were
AirTouch Communications (now Verizon Wireless) and its implementation of
Quest Software's VistaPlus software for ERP integration, and
McKesson/HBOC and its implementation of an AvantGo mobile solution for
paperless shipment management and proof-of-delivery tracking. Imaging &
Document Solutions will publish the AirTouch and McKesson case studies
in upcoming issues.
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