Box 5.3 A Case Study of the Performance of an Enterprise Portal
THE IMPLEMENTATION: BUILT FROM SCRATCH
Marino’s group established three goals for the Frito-Lay portal: to
streamline knowledge, exploit customer-specific data, and foster team
collaboration. He brought in Navigator Systems, a consultancy based
in Dallas, which had worked with Frito-Lay in the past and had some
experience building knowledge management portals. Navigator built a
prototype in about 3 months using technologies previously approved
by Frito-Lay’s IS department
Marino and Navigator essentially had to start from scratch when it
came to populating the portal. “Never before at Frito-Lay had they
tried to capture expertise systematically in one place”, notes Todd
Price, a consultant at Navigator. Marino and Price did an audit within
the company and then created expertise profiles on the portal so that
sales staff in the field would have an easy way to learn who’s who
at headquarters in Plano. That way, people who have expertise in
areas such as promotion planning, activity planning, costing, or new
product announcements can be readily tracked down and contacted
for information.
The portal went live in January 2000. Since then, three additional sales
teams, or customer communities as they are called internally, have
been given access to the portal with different content – including
research abstracts and what Marino calls performance scorecards,
which evaluate account performance. “If somebody in sales or market
research did a study in a particular area like private-label trends, [the
user] would be able to click to that abstract and get a summary of that
study.” Users access the portal, known as the Customer Community
Portal (CCP), through a Netscape Navigator browser and enter their
name and password on the Frito-Lay intranet.
THE RESULTS
The CCP has paid off with increased sales. “What we expected to see
was that the pilot team would outperform others in terms of sales and
profitability”, Marino says. While he declined to give figures, he says the
test team doubled the growth rate of the customer’s business in the
salty snack category. It also made the sales team happier.