Quelle: CIO, Asia
Since their emergence four years ago, portals have become a key component of the corporate IT infrastructure. They are no longer just presentation layers for access to business applications, but are frameworks to enable composite applications as well as mechanisms for integration, content and collaboration services. Portal capabilities have become so valuable they are being built into enterprise software such as ERP, CRM and e-procurement.
As a result companies are not only using portals as tactical tools for managing enterprise applications, but deploying them to support strategic business initiatives. A portal helps Newmont Indonesia, the Indonesian subsidiary of the world's largest gold mining company, Newmont Worldwide Group, increase revenue through improved asset utilisation, and lower inventory costs through just-in-time warehousing. A portal enables Novell Asia Pacific to get more use out of its enterprise systems by hiding their complexity from users. The importance companies are placing on portals is reflected in CIOs' spending decisions. According to Frost & Sullivan, portal sales in the Asia Pacific stood at US $73.3 million in 2002, an 18 percent growth rate above 2001, and is expected to grow to US $108.6 million by the end of 2006.
Portals bridge legacy information
"We have modern day applications such as Windows Office XP, as well as legacy applications. What we needed to do was to give users at our operations all over Indonesia, including mobile users located within the mine, access to any of these applications quickly, making information access as simple as a phone call," says Rohit Diesh, manager, Information Services, for the Indonesian subsidiaries of U.S.-based Newmont Worldwide Group, the world's largest gold mining company. Its subsidiaries in Indonesia include PT Newmont Pacific Nusantara, PTNewmont Minahassa Raya, PT Newmont Horus Nauli and PT Newmont NusaTenggara.
Newmont Indonesia operates gold and copper mines on the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi (1,500 miles northeast of Jakarta) and Sumbawa(950 miles east of Jakarta) - far flung and remote areas with a lack of IT expertise, making the job of giving users access to the data they need, even more challenging. Besides these two mines, it also has an office in the city of Jakarta, as well as on the islands of Lombok and Sumatra. Its primary data centre is situated at the Batu Hajau site on Sumbawa.
Diesh, like a growing number of CIOs in the Asia Pacific, turned to portals to support his company's information strategy and create a competitive advantage for it. Portal and application delivery software - Citrix MetraFrame XP - is helping him to solve his challenge of extending business applications to users in six geographically dispersed locations across Indonesia, and it is doing that with the least cost and pain. With portal technology, all Diesh's users need is a browser to log on and launch full client-server applications. Its key mission-critical applications include a MIMS ERP system (from Australian software house Mincom Ltd), a Novell GroupWise e-mail system and Microsoft XP office suite. Besides MIMS, senior executives can also access other legacy applications such as a cash management system from Citibank, and also have access to reporting tools from Brio Software, Inc.
By getting their business applications quickly and without compromise through a portal instead of by phone, or fax, or accessing the systems hosted at the data centre in Sumbawa, employees get work done more quickly; their increased productivity and mobility translate to added sales, bottom line savings or both.
Centralised access and streamlined application delivery also allows Diesh's IT shop to reduce the time and resources required to deploy, implement and manage its applications. In fact, it only took him two weeks to implement the solution to his users in Sumbawa, and remote users at the five other locations in Indonesia. The Citrix Consulting Services Group assisted in the roll-out.
The power of portal technology is more evident in its mining operations. Using a Dispatch System from Modular Mining Systems, Inc., one of its subsidiaries, PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara (PTNNT), is able to monitor information about mining activities in real time, including the position of a haul truck in the pit, how many trucks are waiting to be loaded at shovels, fuel burn rates and other system alarms and messages. This data, which helps them to optimise the usage of their mining equipment, is accessed via relatively low-cost, thin-client tablets using a wireless network installed within a 20-sq km pit area.
The technology has also benefited on-site engineers in the mines. In the past, at the end of each day, engineers had to manually update information on drill hole and blasting activities. This includes data on emulsion and cast primer usage, hole depth and blast patterns. Now, blasting foremen can provide accurate, up-to-the-minute data using applications on handheld PCs hosted on Citrix servers. This helps to provide PTNNT with a more accurate mine model.
While there were other application delivery technologies in the market, with his organisation's focus on cutting costs, Diesh knew he had to keep his expenditure for information access low. That meant he had to reject the other technologies that were looked at, such as virtual private networks (VPN). "VPNs were comparably more expensive and cumbersome especially when used in conjunction with wireless IP within our 20-sq km wireless pit area." It took just 15 minutes for Diesh to convince his management that a portal could help them access business applications on the go, 24 hours a day - a drastic change from the days, if not weeks, usually needed for such expenditures to be authorised. "Because the cost of the portal was quite low, there wasn't a lot of convincing to be done," he adds.
Diesh chose the Citrix solution not only because he did not have to spend huge sums of money implementing it or Web-enabling his legacy applications, but because Indonesia is communications challenged. "Citrix has a low bandwidth requirement: a 30 kbps dial-up speed from all cities in Indonesia using either a standard dial-up from AT&T or the local provider Indosat for access to our entire suite of applications and files."
As many users weren't tech savvy when the portal was deployed, Diesh mandated each one to attend a 30-minute training class prior to using the system. Most of the training was focused on using RSA authentication codes and dial-up connections on the go. The rest of the usage - clicking on icons to get to the applications - was straightforward.
Portals connect suppliers
Newmont Indonesia did not only focus on improving internal efficiency with its portal, it is using portals to increase supplier efficiency. Diesh claims his is the first company among his competitors in Indonesia to provide its suppliers secure access to its internal systems. For instance, PT Trakindo Utama, Newmont's Caterpillar alliance partner, was given access to the Dispatch System so they could monitor if a particular piece of equipment was breaking down in the pit. Providing this information through a portal, Diesh says, helps Newmont Indonesia to improve the utilisation of its fleet of 68haul trucks. "With access to this system, Trakindo is able to view the real-time status of each truck, such as whether there is an equipment failure and if so, which system has failed. If they see a truck having a problem, they can rapidly despatch someone to fix it. This helps us improve the availability of these million-dollar assets [each truck costs about US$1.8 million]," says Diesh.
At this moment, it has also given another one of its vendor partners, freight forwarder Kuehne & Nagel, access to its MIMS ERP system. "This provides them the capability of updating the status of any particular freight order, in real time, as it moves through our supply chain." That, according to Diesh, reduces inventory costs through just-in-time supply chain management. Another vendor partner he has given access through his portal is Modular Mining Systems, which utilises operations schedules via its portal to support its mining pool. "Modular can log on to various systems in the mine to provide support. If there is a problem in the mine, they can access the system via the portal, look at what is going on real time, and establish a way to fix the problem. Providing them access to our mining applications encourages greater collaboration, smoothening and accelerating our operations processes."
Diesh says a portal will not help his company capture more business from customers - essentially smelting companies that buy its metal products - because the metals industry is a commodity market. The company's focus remains on increasing profitability through lowering costs. And using a portal to link up with suppliers allows him to do that because if he had gone for another solution, such as VPN, he says, he would have had to spend US$5,000 to US$10,000 to implement a firewall solution for each vendor partner, and it would also have been administratively burdening on his staff. "On the other hand, a portal not only allowed us to quickly bring up vendor partners but would also be able to accommodate changes in vendor partner requirements, which include adding new applications on the fly," he says.
Web-based management tools are not very common in the mining industry. Diesh notes that while his is not the only company that has connected its suppliers to its internal mining systems, his is the only one that has provided granularity and security with the capability to view only the information required. For its vendors, access is provided through a Web browser using Citrix Secure Gateway and RSA tokens. Employees access it through Citrix NF use with prior authentication provided by a Novell log-in.
Up next for Newmont: extending the portal application to other Newmont subsidiaries in Peru and Russia. Diesh also plans to increase the number of users in Indonesia from the 170 now to 600 over the course of the year.
Portals serve up shared applications
At Novell Asia Pacific, portals are still doing what they've done for years: connecting employees. CIO Sam Gennaoui of Novell Asia Pacific says Novell's portal is helping the company to get more use out of its internal systems. "Portals allow us to get more ROI out of our older systems, which we have spent millions of dollars implementing over the years, and dumb it down to our users - without spending more money Web-enabling these systems and training our users," he says.
Novell provides personalised portals for its employees - a total of6,000 worldwide, 1,200 of whom work in its Asia Pacific offices in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and India. Depending on their profiles, employees can log on to HR, finance or sales systems via the portal. The data presented through the portal is different for every business executive: When Gennaoui logs on to his portal, for instance, he is able to view the state of ICT systems in the region; his VP of Sales and Marketing would view marketing or sales information personalised within the portal.
Though data presented through the portal is different, staff can use core applications to access what they need. They can apply for annual leave and because the system knows who they are and who they report to, the application is automatically routed to their managers' mailboxes for approval, and then to HR. The portal also provides a platform for internal collaboration: sales proposals are routed to users through their different stages of completion - as these proposals have to go through a number of iterations before being submitted to customers - and upon receipt of customers' response.
Gennaoui says that having a framework for delivering applications through a personalised portal helps him deploy them quickly as they are needed. An example: A new employee used to have to wait a few days for her applications to be set up, losing productivity in the meantime. Now, the system is able to determine the applications that she can access, based on business rules defined by her unique user ID created before her first day (e.g., who she is, when she came onboard, her salary grade, who she reports to). This means new employees can be productive from day one. A single sign-on also means staff no longer need to remember one password for each system, which had to be changed every 30 days - a big administrative headache for both ordinary and IT helpdesk staffers.
Although the applications at Novell Asia Pacific sound incredibly elegant, they did not arrive there overnight. Gennaoui laid the groundwork for his portal in two years as the company invested in a number of IT initiatives, including switching from frame relay and ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) to broadband to connect its offices, and consolidating data centres from one in each of its 10offices in the Asia Pacific, to one in Singapore, Hong Kong and Melbourne.
In the future, Gennaoui plans to use the portal to increase the company's competitive advantage by giving access to data - such as ordering and pricing systems and its resourcing models - to highly-valued external partners.
The best portals
The best portals are those that help companies to extend their existing applications and discover new ones over the Web. "There's a lot of pressure for IT people to do more with less, and tools like portals hook together all sorts of applications and bring new functionality to play for users very quickly - in some cases without even any programming needed by reusing existing business logic," says Steve Bittinger, research director, Gartner.
"If we look at about five years from now, we would say that the future of software in the enterprise is going to be using portals, but we are not going to see people buying just portals," he predicts. Instead, portal capabilities will be built into application platform suites (a suite of integrated software infrastructure technologies for modern business applications, comprising an enterprise application server, portal product and integration suite) and smart enterprise suites(integrated suite containing search, classification, content management, document management, business intelligence, collaboration, knowledge management and process management components). "Certainly, linking in to new technologies like Web services is seen as a very important capability in the portal arena," Bittinger adds.
Diesh counts the portal as part of the company's IT infrastructure and says he can't specify a return on the investment yet. However he sees his portals as a tool for taking costs out of his supply chain. Some of these costs - such as time spent on the phone chasing down order information - will come out of his suppliers' operations as well as his own.
By extending its portal to Kuehne & Nagel, for example, the latter can record stock receipts real-time, thereby reducing the unnecessary ordering of more units. With just-in-time management of its warehouse stocks, less equipment needs to be kept in the warehouse, which also reduces costs.
In addition, with higher utilisation of its haul trucks at its mines, a result of sharing its system with maintenance company Trakindo, it is able to generate more production, which results in higher revenues.
Meanwhile, at Novell, Gennaoui says he has reaped savings ofUS$360,000 in password management, US$4,000,000 in increased productivity and US$2,500,000 in remote access a year worldwide from the use of portals and the move towards broadband and data centre consolidation. He says his portal was built using savings from the switch to broadband, which reduced running costs by 70 to 80 percent.