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.