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September 27, 1999

InformationWeek500
Traditional Values In A High-Tech World

Metals

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While these leading companies have embraced technologies such as enterprise resource planning and supply chains to improve efficiencies and keep up with customers, a core challenge has been bringing many of the buyers and distributors to the same level of innovation in a market historically behind the curve in using IT.

Tall Orders
Inland Steel Industries Inc. is faced with meeting the technological requirements of its buyers, particularly those from the automotive industry. "We have demanding customers who require much stronger integration in order to achieve the delivery of products in a just-in-time reaction," says CIO Howard Ludwig. The company is redesigning its business processes to provide a platform that allows it to integrate with all of its customers.

A key initiative for Inland is multichannel service, so the company presents a single face to customers while allowing them to use their preferred method of contact. Integrated databases feed all Inland employees standardized information, so all live points of contact are delivering consistent data to the customer. Customer self-service over the Web will soon be added to that formula, Ludwig says.

Despite the experience of Inland Steel, the deployment of new technologies is helpful to most companies in the metals and natural-resources industries in meeting the needs of larger, more advanced customers. But these companies also can't afford to abandon their small, less-innovative customers. Creative means of meeting that challenge are helping these manufacturers see their investments pay off.

Georgia-Pacific, for example, has responded to the demands of heavy-spending retailers such as The Home Depot by developing online catalogs with those customers to reduce transactional costs between the retailer and the consumer. Being able to use that expertise in E-commerce with smaller customers could increase the return on that investment.

To that end, Williams opened his IT staff to his customers to help bring them to the same technological level. "Our smaller wholesalers and distributors may not have the expertise or sophisticated IT shops," he says. "We're using our IT resources to help our customers with less IT resources."

Conversely, Timken has taken a different approach to meeting its less-IT-capable customers halfway. "If you truly want to be customer-centric, you have to realize that they're all different and you have to offer all different types of service," says director of IS Crawford. "We have customers that have put huge investments in old technology and haven't seen the business case to build an IP backbone." Crawford says she'd rather do business with them on their terms than lose the relationship, and she has gone so far as to create a mainframe-text version of services the company offers on the Web to keep certain customers happy.

Communication within the business, through distributors, and toend customers is imperative for companies looking to stay competitive in this industry.

But as the uses of technology to accomplish these goals are fast becoming the standard in a commoditized and overcapacitated market, these leaders understand that there won't be opportunity to rest. Says Kimberly-Clark's Assink, "If the competitive advantage is there now, it's short lived."

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