Project No 3: Enterprise Portals - 'ZIFFPAGE TITLEA Site to Be '
(
Page 4 of 5 )
Seen">
A Site to Be Seen
Some businesses look at portals as competitive weapons. BI Technologies, which makes passive electronics components, is adding SAP's Enterprise Portal to its new enterprise resource planning system in an attempt to gain an edge in the fiercely contested electronics manufacturing industry.
"For anything we make, there are three or four others who make the same thing," explains Bill Cooper, BI's manager of information systems and technologies. "One way to distinguish ourselves is to make it easy to do business with us by providing faster and more accurate information."
The company is not rushing into anything, though. In May, BI expected to begin giving selected customers access to its business intelligence reports, such as buying histories and product backlogs.
A second phase of the project will open up BI's SAP system to customers—a trickier challenge, according to Cooper, because it involves questions of how much internal data to distribute outside the organization.
