Tales of Two Portals

by Russell Letson

Enterprise portals now address such a variety of business needs that the term may become, as one observer put it, "content free." But while the terminology may be wearing thin, the payoffs certainly aren't. Perhaps that's why so many different types of technology vendors have jumped on the portal bandwagon.

Portals are popping up as e-business sites, in supply chain and distribution chain systems, and, in their original form, as a corporate workspace offering single sign-on access to enterprisewide content. Uniting varied, sometimes disparate, sources of relevant content not only fosters collaboration, it improves business function and can even open up new opportunities.

Take the example of software giant Autodesk, which has created a customer-centric portal that builds product loyalty through community. The effort has yielded new sources of revenue in the process. Office furniture supplier Herman Miller pioneered the sharing of real-time ERP data with its suppliers. The initiative has not only improved accuracy and streamlined production, it has yielded savings and improved customer service. Read on to find out how these companies are making the most of their portals.

Content for Customer Relations

CAD kingpin Autodesk, San Rafael, CA, has a long tradition of maintaining a community of users, developers, consultants and resellers. The company's Point A Web site (pointa01.autodesk.com) is a classic example of an informational portal driven by customer relations.

The purpose of Point A, according to the site's content and marketing chief, Jerry Labay, is to provide a meeting place for Autodesk's 4 million customers worldwide. Visitors can find not only information about the products and services offered by Autodesk and its partners, but they can also tap into news and content tailored to their particular interests.

Point A divides into areas that correspond to the industry segments Autodesk serves: AEC (architecture-engineering-construction); manufacturing; land development and civil engineering; GIS and mapping; and general design and drafting. Each area gathers links to discussion groups, industry-related Web sites, industry-related services, news feeds, support content, and organizations dedicated to codes, standards and regulations. GIS users, for example, will find links to sources of imagery such as base maps and satellite and aerial photos. Individual home pages can be further personalized to reflect the customer's particular interests.

Autodesk chose Epicentric's portal product for Point A. "It let us build a robust Web site without having to build everything from scratch," says Labay. For example, Autodesk makes use of Epicentric's syndicated content services for news, stocks, weather - "things that customers like to see in a portal," Labay says.

The system, which runs on seven NT servers with an Oracle database on the back end, has 180,000 members and approximately 500,000 visits and 5 million page views per month. Labay says the portal's greatest benefit has been customer retention.

"I've been amazed at how engaged our customers are with our products, how lively the discussion groups are," he says. "The tools and information we offer through Point A are going to make our customers more productive, which makes them more likely to buy future versions of software from us. Also, there's a competitive advantage; none of our competitors have a site like Point A."

The Point A portal has created a valuable resource for users while also creating new revenue sources for Autodesk. "We're not just collecting these vendors together out of the goodness of our heart," Labay says. "We're actually getting some compensation for referring people to their services."

Autodesk does not conduct direct e-commerce on Point A, though it plans to do so. The site has links to company and partner online stores. For now, Autodesk has a product upgrade/release subscription service for customers, with Point A as the entry and support site. In addition, says Labay, the company is building portals for its major accounts with access to Autodesk-related information, special events, special pricing, contact lists, training and support, and even knowledge bases connected to the customers' businesses. It is, says Labay, "almost like Point A becoming the customer's design portal on their intranet."

Autodesk's core AutoCAD application now includes a direct link to Point A. "If you're in our architectural product and you want sample door or window templates, you don't have to build them from scratch," Labay says. "In the menu you bring up door styles and it takes you to Point A, where all that content resides."

Tightening the Supply Chain

About five years ago, the senior executives at office furniture designer and manufacturer Herman Miller, Zeeland, MI, decided to challenge the perception that the office furniture market is slow moving and unreliable. "At that point," says e-commerce team leader Mike Brunsting, "we were averaging about 75 percent complete, on-time [deliveries] to our customers, and we were probably leading our industry."

Herman Miller, Brunsting says, is the "least vertically integrated" of the four major office furniture companies. Instead of building for stock, they build to order.

"We rely very heavily on our supply chain to make our product," Brunsting explains. "When a customer orders a product from us, we have to filter those demand requirements down to our suppliers."

The strategy it settled on was to leverage technology internally and to connect to customers and suppliers to improve the whole value chain. The company was implementing Baan enterprise resource planning and I2 manufacturing planning solutions, and it decided to use the Internet to connect with suppliers and use the Baan data in real time. Even though most people weren't looking to use the Internet in this advanced way back in 1997, "we really put a stake in the ground," Brunsting says.

The company chose Top Tier (now SAP Portals, San Jose, CA) because Baan had been using Top Tier's technology to Web-enable its own applications. "It had already accomplished what we wanted to do," Brunsting says. "The only challenge was that the tool was designed to be an internal enterprise system, and we wanted to use it as an extranet system. We worked closely with Top Tier, which had to do some custom work - give it the encryption and security - to allow it to be an extranet application."

When Herman Miller decided to go to a full-fledged portal model, it became a beta customer for Top Tier's latest portal solution. Herman Miller's current portal setup consists of the Top Tier Enterprise Unification Platform backed by an Oracle data warehouse that serves as a point for supplier information.

The portal exposes four data sources: Baan structured data, the Oracle warehouse, unstructured document content from a server, plus the main portal information, which sends users to external sources such as news feeds.

"The portal is allowing us to cut down the lead time to manufacture a product from the time it's ordered to the time it's shipped," Brunsting reports, adding that it has also increased inventory turns and improved accuracy. "Suppliers tell us that since they've had access to this information, they have been able to reduce inaccurate invoicing by 70 percent. There are a lot of examples of suppliers being able to reduce the time they spend doing paperwork or making phone calls to Herman Miller because they have the information themselves."

Herman Miller's portal initiative is focused on strategic payoffs rather than return on investment. "Our vice president of information technology has told me he doesn't want me spending one second of my time chasing numbers," Brunsting says. "Everything we do is focused on improving and supporting reliability to our customers."

The one metric Brunsting has tracked is the complete/on-time rate, which has risen to the high 90s, he says, from 75 percent five years ago.

Russell Letson (rletson@cloudnet.com) is a freelance writer based in St.Cloud, MN.