The view on portals
Portal choices of Ion, Siemens Medical Systems, and others pinpoint benefits, innovative uses, and deployment issues
By Sidney Hill Jr., Executive Editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2001 6:00:00 AM
Founded three years ago, TriVirix International, a contract manufacturer, seeks to capitalize on trends toward perfecting product design, while "outsourcing" the actual building of products to manufacturing experts.
"Our motto is, 'We want to be your manufacturing department,'" says Michael Labriola, vice president of operations and a co-founder of Chapel Hill, N.C.-based TriVirix.
To support that goal, TriVirix freely shares information about its business with its customers. "We don't hide anything," Labriola says. "Our customers are privy to our cost data. They can see the vendors we use, the prices we pay for components, and our agreements for components delivery."
From the outset, TriVirix—which specializes in building medical equipment—envisioned sharing this information with customers over the Internet, Labriola says. Late last year, that vision became reality with the launch of AllianceNet, an Internet-based system that offers TriVirix customers an open window into TriVirix's operations.
AllianceNet is powered by mySAP Workplace, the enterprise portal application from SAP, Walldorf, Germany. AllianceNet also is a prime example of how manufacturing and distribution companies are deploying enterprise portals.
A complete view
As the term implies, enterprise portals are desktop interfaces that present a view into all of the information that flows through an organization. Because they are linked to the Internet, portal interfaces also can display data from external sources, such as content from public Web sites or information posted on a trading partner's private Web site.
The design of most enterprise portal applications mirrors that of consumer-oriented Internet portals such as Yahoo! and Excite, which allow individuals to "personalize" their interfaces by selecting preferred information sources.
When software vendors introduced the concept of enterprise portals roughly two years ago, The Delphi Group, a Boston-based market research and consulting firm, dubbed them "the killer application for knowledge management." That was based on the idea that portals would perform like electronic efficiency experts, organizing all of the information and resources that workers would need to do their jobs.
Today, Larry Hawes, a senior analyst with The Delphi Group, says, "We see enterprise portals as great knowledge management tools, but their value also extends to other areas." Specifically, some companies have used portal technology to create the front-end interfaces for extranets, the private, Internet-based networks that provide secure communication between companies in a single supply chain. In the manufacturing arena, some extranets have become the equivalent of private trading exchanges, with the portal interface acting as a business-to-business e-commerce storefront, as well as a platform for aggregating information.
Innovative uses
"Manufacturers are among the most innovative users of portal technology," says Mark Krawczyk, director of strategic marketing for Sequoia Software (recently acquired by Citrix Systems), a portal technology provider based in Columbia, Md. "Maybe it's because they feel the pain—more than companies in other industries—of not being able to present detailed information to their customers. The manufacturers we have worked with see the portal as a way of giving their customers instant access to information—such as inventory levels and order status—that previously was disseminated by telephone, fax, or some other manual method."
Eastman Chemical, a global manufacturer of chemicals, fibers, and plastics, is using Sequoia's XML Portal Server application for one-stop employee access to internal and external information. Through a single interface, users receive detailed information about Eastman's customers. They also can tap into the business intelligence applications that Eastman uses to measure its business performance. And they can tunnel out of Eastman's corporate network to find out what the business press is reporting about their industry.
Like most companies that have implemented corporate portals, Eastman Chemical's IT department has set up various information menus that appeal to different work roles, leaving individuals free to select the specific data sources they want on their desktops. "There is so much information available today that people tend to ignore a lot of it," says David Holden, Eastman Chemical's manager of e-commerce applications and services. "We are trying to bring the most relevant information and applications together in one spot so people get information they can actually use."
Establishing 'best practices'
Delphi Group's Hawes says it's becoming common practice to give users a list of data sources to choose from, largely because of lessons learned by early adopters of portals. He adds that companies are finding that a well-managed enterprise portal initiative can be an effective vehicle for spreading "best practices" throughout the business organization.
"The ability to personalize desktops was the first aspect of portals that both vendors and users latched onto as being of value," Hawes relates. "What happened in practice, however, is that as IT departments gave users free rein to personalize everything, they essentially were creating new islands of automation, rather than unifying information sources through the portal. Consequently, they began limiting users' choices, based on their roles. Many of these companies also found that if they could establish best practices within a role, and communicated that information across the organization through the portal, they were getting additional value."
An enterprise portal supports cross-functional best practices for Siemens Medical Systems, Neurenburg, Germany. The company's field service engineers log into the portal via laptop computers for on-line help when they encounter an unfamiliar problem while servicing equipment. This information typically comes from other engineers who also have encountered the problem, documented a solution, and uploaded it to a central data repository connected to the portal.
The 4,500 users of this portal include technical writers who create the documents that the engineers access, as well as customer service representatives. Heiner Mollekopk, a Siemens project manager, says these reps—most of whom work in a call center—use the portal to access technical data and information from the customer relationship management (CRM) module of Siemens' enterprise resources planning (ERP) system—SAP's R/3 package.
Portal technology
From a pure technical standpoint, corporate portals typically rest on a similar infrastructure. Most vendors have used development technologies such as Microsoft's Common Object Model (COM), or Sun Microsystems's Java programming language, to build an application framework that allows plugging in functional components. Portal functions typically include user-authentication, search engine capabilities, and a methodology for personalizing desktops.
The portal platform also must contain a mechanism for extracting information from a company's back-end databases and business systems, as well as from outside data sources, and displaying that information on the user interface. Increasingly, eXtensible markup language (XML) is becoming the standard for translating data from its native format into a format that can be displayed through the portal interface.
When a TriVirix customer logs onto AllianceNet, they see a Web page that was created especially for them. The page bears the customer's company name and links to all information on jobs that TriVirix is performing for that company. The network also has a video connection that displays live, around-the-clock views of TriVirix's manufacturing facility in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
By clicking the sales order button on the opening screen, the customer can review the status of all of pending orders. "This is live data," Labriola says. "It is constantly updated as soon as new data is entered into our [R/3] system in Belfast.
"Our customers' purchasing agents absolutely love this," Labriola adds, "because they can navigate through it themselves and find out exactly where their orders stand. They know which items we have in stock, what is work-in-process, and what parts we have on-order."
An age-old debate
Rising interest in enterprise portals has led to a renewal of the age-old, best-of-breed versus single-vendor debate, which centers on the question of whether it is better to buy technology from a single vendor with a broad suite—such as an ERP provider—or from suppliers that specialize in a single type of application. Many manufacturers are confronting the question of whether to buy their portal applications from their ERP or CRM supplier, rather than from a best-of-breed portal provider.
SAP was one of the first ERP suppliers to market a portal product, introducing mySAP Workplace in September 1999. Since then, however, nearly every major ERP provider has developed an enterprise portal product. PeopleSoft, Pleasanton, Calif., and IFS, Chicago, each offer a set of three portals aimed at customers, suppliers, and employees. Siebel Systems, a San Mateo, Calif.-based supplier of CRM applications, also has an enterprise portal product. Not surprisingly, these vendors all embrace the single-vendor approach.
Bruce Kirschenbaum, director of business solutions consulting for IFS, says the single-vendor strategy will result in substantial cash savings, primarily because both the initial implementation and ongoing maintenance of the portal will be less complicated. "Your back-office system provider is going to be familiar with mapping your data for initial integration into the portal," Kirschenbaum says. "And when the back-office application is updated, it will include changes that affect the links to the portal. If you take the one-stop-shop approach, all of these things will be taken care of by that single vendor."
Best-of-breed vendors obviously have a different view. "Very few manufacturing companies are complete-SAP or complete-PeopleSoft shops," says Carla Corkern, a vice president with Data Channel, a best-of-breed portal supplier based in Bellevue, Wash. "Most manufacturers have numerous systems, including legacy applications. We can address the issues involved in integrating those various data sources into a portal interface."
Says Mark Tanis, TriVirix's vice president of IT, "The SAP portal was a good fit for us because we already were using SAP's ERP system and we wanted to standardize on a single vendor's product as much as possible."
Tanis adds that TriVirix experienced few problems with its portal implementation, but he also acknowledges that, as a startup company, "we didn't have any legacy systems to deal with."
Besides SAP's R/3 suite, the systems behind the TriVirix portal are primarily Microsoft applications such as Word and FrontPage. More specifically, TriVirix creates documents, such as manufacturing instructions and quality control manuals, in Word. When information from a Word document needs to be combined with SAP data to create a report, the person creating the report uses FrontPage to build a Web page that contains links to the appropriate data. Those data sources can be either a module within the SAP system, or a set of Word documents.
Eastman Chemical and Siemens Medical Systems also use SAP's R/3 system, but both chose best-of-breed applications for their enterprise portals. Eastman Chemical chose Sequoia's XML Portal Sever application, while Siemens selected the Hyperwave Information Server from Hyperwave, Munich, Germany.
Mollekopk says Siemens selected Hyperwave largely because SAP had not released its portal product when Siemens began its portal project, yet he was concerned whether the SAP application, when it was released, would support integration of the various types of data that Siemens wanted to flow through its portal.
"We are merging numerous types of data, including unstructured notes that we get from engineers, schematics, drawings, and information from instruction manuals," Mollekopk says. "I am not sure we could have done that with an SAP application."
Breaking with tradition
SAP's history of developing nearly all of its applications in-house has created a perception within the marketplace that it does not want users merging third-party applications with its solutions. Bill Wohl, an SAP spokesman, says this never was the case, and argues that recent developments related to SAP's product direction should quell those thoughts.
Those developments include the March announcement that SAP intends to acquire Top Tier, a San Jose, Calif.-based best-of-breed portal technology provider. Top Tier's technology is the underlying engine for mySAP Workplace, as well as portal products for other enterprise software vendors such as long-time SAP rival Baan, Reston, Va.
Soon after announcing the Top Tier acquisition, SAP unveiled plans to form a new subsidiary that will concentrate on selling portal technology. In the same news conference, SAP said it would begin working with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo! to blend general Web-based content, such as news feeds, into the SAP portal framework.
The new SAP business unit—SAP Portals—will be headed by Shai Agassi, Top Tier's CEO. Agassi says SAP Portals will market its products as stand-alone applications to companies outside of SAP's customer base, and license its portal technology to other software providers. "We made it clear during our negotiations that we did not want to create a portal just for SAP," Agassi says. "My goals call for getting a significant piece of revenue outside of the SAP customer base."
Other enterprise vendors may not mimic SAP in marketing their portals as stand-alone products, but they will have to build portal frameworks that are open enough to aggregate and display data from a wide variety of sources—including competing vendors' applications. Users are demanding that flexibility.
For more info:
Baan: www.bann.com
Data Channel: www.datachannel.com
Hyperwave: www.hyperwave.com
IFS: www.ifsna.com
PeopleSoft: www.peoplesoft.com
Portal Wave: www.portalwave.com
SAP: www.sap.com
Sequoia Software: www.citrix.com
Siebel Systems: www.siebel.com
