InformationWeek

December 22, 1997

Chief Of The Year Honorable Mentions

Client-Server Advantage: Mike Radcliff, Owens Corning

lenty of CIOs talk about building systems that contribute to the bottom line-but Mike Radcliff, CIO at Owens Corning for the last three years, is actually doing it. The company projects that his Advantage 2000 program will not only replace more than hundreds of legacy systems with client-server apps, but will also add 20 cents to its earnings per share next year.

Not bad for a project that's late and over budget. Advantage 2000's implementation, planned at 18 months, is now going into its second year, and its total cost is about $130 million, nearly twice the original estimate. "We were off by a factor of three in deployment, training, and change-management," Radcliff explains. "We seriously underestimated the learning curve." To be fair, the number of employees to be trained has jumped from 7,500 to mo re than 12,000.

Advantage 2000 was launched in 1995 as Owens Corning, the Toledo, Ohio, maker of fiberglass, industrial asphalt, and building

materials, undertook an aggressive acquisitions program aimed at transforming the company into a full-service building supplier and increasing its annual revenue to $5 billion by the year 2000. Today, after making 17 acquisitions, Owens Corning has met its revenue goal two years early.

Advantage 2000 replaces more than 260 mainframe-based legacy systems with SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft running on a brand-new client-server architecture. By July, Advantage 2000 had been rolled out to 60 sites in business units representing $3 billion in annual sales.

IS isn't going it alone on Advantage 2000. Ten process-oriented teams drawn from a pool of 100 IS employees and 100 business managers are carrying out the project. For example, Alan Booth, the former head of the company's insulation business, was given global responsibilities for the order-to-fulfillment process . "This integrated system is about doing the job differently, and about changes in structure and accountability," he explains.

Advantage 2000 is already cutting IS costs. Before the project, Owens Corning spent 2.4% of sales on IT, compared with a 2% industry average. Owens Corning's figure should fall to 1.9% in 1998, and by mid-1999, when the Advantage 2000 rollout is completed, IS costs will be an industry-leading 1.5% of sales. All told, Owens Corning expects to save as much as $30 million next year; that figure is projected to hit $50 million in 2000.

The system will also take care of most of Owens Corning's year 2000 problem by simply replacing legacy code. As a result, the company has no year 2000 staff. What Advantage 2000 didn't take care of, regular hardware and software upgrades should.

Back to News in Review