InformationWeek

Eric Boelter, VP of sales and marketing, says this rapid deployment was due in part to the company's previous experience deploying the J.D. Edwards software. "We had people who knew what they wanted and didn't get into the politicking that often slows down these deployments," he says.

Like many companies, Boelter had E-business objectives that enterprise resource planning alone couldn't address. "We were producing paper catalogs that cost about $100,000 every time we ran them," Boelter says. "In addition to eliminating that cost, an electronic catalog was a way to differentiate ourselves."

In his search for an E-commerce solution to tack onto his ERP system, Boelter looked long and hard for something that met the particular requirements of a business-to-business distributor. "We're not a manufacturer, so we can't differentiate ourselves by having the best product," he says. "Instead, what we have to do is facilitate procurement by our customers. A lot of people don't get that."

Boelter found his solution in Ironside Technologies Inc.'s Ironworks for SAP. "Most business-to-business commerce right now is replenishment business," Boelter says. "With Ironworks and SAP, we have the ability to create order templates for each customer based on what they typically order. That way, they can just go through it and either check off an item or change it."

Just as important, orders move right through the Ironworks application to the picking and shipping tools in Boelter's SAP warehouse-management module. "Without that integration, there isn't much point to having a business-to-business Web site," Boelter says. "If someone is going to have to re-key orders, you might as well just have customers phone them in." With the integration, Boelter says his company can take significant costs out of the order-fulfillment process.

Boelter also lauds Ironworks' performance. "Their Java applet is much more efficient than most of the ones you see out there, and they make full use of graphics compression," he says. "That makes the site very fast." The enhancements provided by a product such as Ironworks come at a fraction of the price of the ERP implementation itself--in Boelter's case, something under 10% of their seven-figure SAP budget. "It's a much simpler deployment," Boelter says. "Instead of pulling everybody into meetings all the time, we only needed to have two people working on it."

For Dick Boenisch, manager of IS for kitchen-and-bath company Kohler Co.'s technical services division, the incremental cost to Web-enable his enterprise resource planning system was even lower. "There's no comparison," he says. "It was easily less than 1% of the total cost of our SAP R/3 implementation."

And, as with Tosco's AppWorx deployment, Kohler's ERP Web project is based on a third-party product that's not specifically a Web solution. In Kohler's case, it's Cognos Inc.'s business-intelligence software, which includes Cognos Accelerator, a tool that extracts and transforms R/3 data and places it into an Oracle data warehouse, where it can be queried from users' PCs via the Web.

Browser access lets users get fast access to all kinds of highly useful business information. "Before, it would take months to get reports to users," Boenisch says. "They'd have to put in a request to a business analyst, who would then hand it off to a programmer, who would then have to write the necessary R/3 code." Now, users can directly query the data warehouse themselves. Kohler's IT staff also created intranet Web pages that users can view on a daily basis.

Boenisch says this has led to some significant operational benefits. For example, manufacturing managers can see when an unusually large order comes in. "In the past, that kind of order might not have shown up on their radar screens until it was time to produce it. By then, there might not be enough lead time to order the necessary materials," notes Boenisch. "Now, they can take action right away."

Distributing such data via the Web is enormously efficient for a far-flung, multisite company such as Kohler, he adds. "If we had to do everything on a client-server basis across our wide area network, we'd probably need T3 lines to every site," he says. "But with browsers, the traffic is so minimal that we only need to use a small piece of the T1 lines that we already have in place."

Browser access to ERP data means Kohler can ultimately give all its employees access to R/3 data without necessarily shelling out the cost of an SAP seat license for every user. Licensing fees are typically several thousand dollars apiece. "Some people only need to see the data," says Boenisch.

Despite the automated data extraction, integration, and process-control systems available from vendors such as AppWorx and Ironside, IT professionals still need to "get under the hood" to make things work, says analyst McLeod. That's why he's bullish on the prospects for systems integrators that specialize in business-to-business ERP extensions. "Corporate IT departments are already overwhelmed," McLeod says. "If you can get a systems integrator with experience in this area, they can be a huge help."

For companies preparing to extend their ERP systems to the Web, McLeod has a word of caution: security. "Security is a major issue," he says. "You simply can't afford to have your competition eavesdropping on what you're doing with your closest business partners." Over the long run, he says, delivery to browsers and partners' systems won't be the only extensions that ERP users will need to deploy. "Companies are going to want to get this stuff to cell phones, too," he says.

There are lots of ways to leverage the tremendous investments companies have already made in their enterprise resource planning systems, and plenty of vendors are lining up with tools to help make it happen. Now, if someone could only come up with a cloning technology that would let IT managers replicate enough of a supporting cast to get everything done, ERP-to-business-to-business could be in production mode by summer.

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