Box 5.3 A Case Study of the Performance of an Enterprise Portal
For example, the pilot team members reside in 10 different cities, so the
tool has become extremely valuable for communication and helps cut
down on travel. A year after implementing the portal, the pilot group
has been able to share documents concurrently instead of having to
send faxes around the country to different offices. “It’s almost a distance
learning tool as much as anything else”, he says.
The CCP has also helped foster a sense of camaraderie and relationship
building. For example, the portal homepage lists the team members’
birthdays. People can also share best practices – on anything under
the sun. If someone developed an effective sales presentation for a
potential customer in Boston, a salesperson in San Francisco could coopt
the information. Salespeople can also find the latest news about
their customers, and theirs is an automatic messaging feature that tells
team members who is online.
For Ackerman, the portal has also been an invaluable tool for helping
him assess employee skill sets, because each salesperson is required to
catalog his or her strengths and areas of expertise. “As a team leader,
it helps me analyze where people’s gaps might be without having to
travel to another member’s location”, he says.
The portal has also helped boost employee retention rates, says
Ackerman. Turnover used to be terrible, he says, because salespeople
felt pressured to find vital information and communicate with the rest of
the team. Marino adds that salespeople felt frustrated and disconnected
because there was no way to efficiently collaborate with the rest of their
group unless they flew into a central location.
Since the portal has been in place, not one person on the 15-member
team has left. Part of that can directly be attributed to the portal, says
Ackerman, because it helps build the connection. In company surveys,
salespeople previously complained about geographic constraints and
how they did not feel connected and part of a team, he says.
The portal has proven so successful that its use has now become a
PepsiCo initiative, says Marino. That means it will soon have added
functionality so that employees across all three divisions – including
Tropicana – can take advantage of product performance information
on a jointly shared customer like a supermarket, he says.