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March 28, 2002

Special Event Section — DCI Corporate and E-Business Portals Conference

The 7 Steps of Portal Development

An enterprise portal provides internal and external users with an integrated, personalized, and secure Web interface to business information, applications, and services

By Colin White with Clive Finkelstein

Clicks-and-bricks retailer Herman Miller Inc. does most of its business selling high-end, preassembled office furniture. In order to accomplish this, Herman Miller deployed an e-Business Portal called MySIGN (Supplier Information Global Network) to create a supplier value chain. The MySIGN portal serves as a personal "Webtop," providing every party throughout the company's value chain with realtime information from the enterprise's ERP applications and databases. This information sharing gives Herman Miller and its suppliers a competitive advantage, helping it stay in sync with customer demands, changes to internal schedules, and intercompany receipts and payments.

What are the steps involved in planning and developing an enterprise portal? By identifying seven key tasks you need to consider when planning your portal project, I hope to give you a place to get started. Throughout, I will use Herman Miller as an example. The company, along with software supplier Top Tier Software Inc. (now part of SAP Portals Inc.) won the e-Business Portal category in the 2001 DCI Portal Excellence Awards, which Intelligent Enterprise sponsored and took part in judging.

1. Develop the portal business case and project plan. The key to success in developing your business case for a portal is to determine the pain points in the organization that a portal can help address, and then find business sponsors for the portal project that have the most to gain by removing those pain points. It is also important to develop a set of metrics that enable you to measure the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) of the portal on a continuing basis.

To successfully accomplish this step, you must identify an executive sponsor for the project and identify and train the portal development team, including subject-matter experts. From the senior executives down, Herman Miller decided it needed a solution that would give its suppliers a competitive advantage by helping them stay in touch with customer demands, changes to internal schedules, and intercompany receipts and payments. In other words, the project expressed a clear corporate strategy. Herman Miller also identified a group of employees to develop and maintain the project.

You also need to define the business goals and requirements of the portal project and identify key metrics to measure ROI and TCO. Herman Miller had two main requirements in building the portal. One was to have two-way communication — back-and-forth collaboration with suppliers. The second was to give suppliers a realtime look at Herman Miller's business. The portal was designed to help suppliers in two areas: On the financial side, suppliers can look at prices and invoices to make sure they're in sync; on the planning side, suppliers can look at Herman Miller's manufacturing lead times and engineering data such as materials requirements, drawings, and revision letters.

An important planning element for this project is identifying potential risks that may affect the schedule or cost of the project. Some people at Herman Miller were afraid suppliers would feel like the company was putting the burden on the suppliers. However, the reception has been very positive because the benefits for suppliers more than make up for any burden. In the past, suppliers had to make decisions based on very limited information, so they often made assumptions when shipping materials. The portal eliminates the need to call three people at Herman Miller to get information, which is a big time-saver.

Once you have developed the project business case and received approval, you begin planning for the portal implementation.

2. Conduct a business content and services requirements study. The key objectives in this step are to identify the portal users and their role in the organization, the types of business content portal users need to do their jobs, and the business decisions and actions that control how business content flows between portal users within the organization. With this information you can begin developing a content management system strategy, the initial portal taxonomy, and the user scenarios and scripts that you'll use to prototype portal applications.

Herman Miller has deployed its portal for both internal and external use. Internally, portal users include personnel in various roles such as supply management personnel, material planners, and quality engineers. Externally, suppliers also use the portal, and users are found in multiple departments, such as management, customer service, scheduling, quality assurance and finance.

3. Select, install, and integrate portal technologies and products. To develop the portal product selection criteria, you need the user-functional requirements from Step 2 and a list of technology requirements for integrating the portal into the overall enterprise IT environment. These requirements include understanding the existing IT infrastructure and its integration and development requirements and identifying your portal scalability and performance requirements to determine which capabilities you need in your portal product. You can then define the portal architecture and product selection criteria to develop a master list of vendors. Now you can evaluate, select, and install the portal product.

In choosing a portal solution, Herman Miller looked for a forward-thinking, easy-to-implement solution that would let it increase efficiency and reduce lead times, while at the same time increase reliability and improve customer and supplier relationships across the enterprise. It needed to eliminate the waste in communicating with its suppliers: but it had been previously unsuccessful in getting widespread adoption of an electronic data interchange (EDI) standard because many of the company's suppliers lacked the technical sophistication or the resources to implement EDI.

Thus, to avoid the complications of EDI and still gain the benefits of a fast and reliable means for supporting supplier relationships, Herman Miller chose Top Tier to help it create MySIGN. Because most of the company's raw materials come from 600 suppliers around the world, it desperately needed to streamline communications and payment procedures. MySIGN anchors a virtual value chain that closes the loop between demand forecasting and supplier-managed inventory by creating an online supplier source for up-to-date information on demand, supply, exception orders, invoices, delivery schedules, and lag times. All this critical business intelligence may be synchronized on one computer screen.