Interestingly, the success of CEO got the bank's managers thinking about ways to leverage portal technology. And it didn't take long for them to settle on a new project. "The tools we were providing our customers far exceeded what we were providing employees," notes Peltz. Keen to reduce the gap, last December the bank rolled out its iCEO internal portal. Designed with technology provided by BEA, iCEO helped the company reduce the number of internal Websites. Because user desktops are customizable, employees also now can choose the applications on their computers. And there are plenty of apps to choose from: Wells Fargo operates close to 300 internal and external software programs.
Acquiring Complications
Faced with the tough job of integrating applications, some businesses try to lessen the hassle by limiting the number of vendors from which they purchase software, or turning to a single vendor for the whole job. Such an approach, however, pretty much poleaxes any thoughts of purchasing best-of-breed software. Moreover, experts say even single-vendor shops generally have numerous versions of the same program running on different computers. And different versions of the same program don't always work well together. Acquisitions further muddy the picture, as companies are often forced to match legacy software with existing systems.
In some ways, though, portals can help ease the M&A pain. Consider the case of Rohm & Haas Co., a specialty chemical producer that has embarked on a number of acquisitions in the past few years, including two large deals in 1999. All told, the purchases left the company with 300 different software programs to manage. Then, in 2000, management at Rohm & Haas decided to roll out SAP's R/3. "The old systems were somewhat burdensome to use," notes vice president and global CIO Anne Wilms. "We wanted to simplify the whole interface to the back-end system."
All the acquisitions tended to make the simplification anything but simple, says Wilms. So to make the plan work, Rohm & Haas ended up deploying an internal portal. Based on SAP's myApps suite of products, the interface ties together the company's operational systems, knowledge-management systems, and external information sources, and makes it easier for workers to access back-office data. Wilms says the company believes the new platform could lead to a reduction in inventory, as well as days sales outstanding. "Without a portal," she notes, "the project would have been impossible."
The price tag? The Philadelphia-based company has spent less than $2 million to deploy the portal. Real money, sure, but loose change compared with the $300 million Rohm & Haas has invested in its ERP makeover. That's the beauty of portal technology, insists Plumtree's Jay Simons, vice president of product strategy. "For a fairly incremental cost, you can get a huge bang for your buck."
Portal Bellies Mushroom
Even small projects offer benefits. Pratt & Whitney, for instance, maintains more than 30 finance-related portals. One, an online community, is a virtual meeting place for the company's global network of controllers. Another enables the finance staffers to access important documents regardless of where they're working — no matter the size of the files. Says controller Montesi: "Portals are a great way to share documents."
Actually, the new crop of portal offerings admirably pulls together all sorts of unrelated data, both structured and unstructured. The result: companies can commingle information, such as inventory churn and customer satisfaction, that might not otherwise work together in a single dashboard. "The trick is tying five or six information sources together, so that when you pull up a view, it makes sense," says Dave Shirk, senior vice president of products, strategy, and worldwide marketing at Vignette. "Otherwise, you're just doing a link-a-matic."
The Plumtree tool at Syncrude Canada Ltd., a Fort McMurray, Alberta-based oil producer, goes well beyond a link-a-matic. In fact, the company's portal offers a glimpse of just how much information can now be distilled in a single view. Syncrude, which draws petroleum from oil sands, uses a network of some 250,000 monitors to keep tabs on activities at the company's refineries. And Darcy Daugela, leader of the company's Web-services team, says the portal enables workers to track key performance indicators — drawn from those quarter-million gauges — right on their desktops.
Daugela acknowledges that much of the information was accessible before the company rolled out its portal. But, he adds, with the voice of a man who's done his share of data queries, "it wasn't easily accessible."
John Goff is technology editor of CFO.
Payback Is a Hitch
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