InformationWeek

"People said, 'This is going to be a great productivity tool for us,'" says Fowler, who shares responsibility for the portal design and implementation with Nall.

In the next few months, about 6,000 executives and other management-level employees of the 50,000-employee home-appliance company will be using portals specific to their business function in 10 facilities around the country, Nall says. Fowler and Nall won't comment on the cost of the portal implementations or on how much the company expects will be saved because of the deployment.

"If we're able to save each given individual 10 minutes a day, what is that worth? We think it's worth a lot," Fowler says. "We actually expect to be able to provide more time savings than that--maybe 40 minutes a day, maybe an hour and a half."

Implementations for IT and finance are already deployed, Nall says. The human-resources portal is only partially developed, but is already in use, and the implementations for purchasing, legal, and sales and marketing will be completed later this year, he says.

The portals, which are based on Portal Server from Epicentric Inc., have the look of an Internet portal such as Yahoo and provide access to tools commonly found on portals, such as search engines and E-mail. But the content is geared to individual job functions.

When a finance-unit employee logs on to the portal, reports appropriate to the person's job function are displayed automatically. The portal's security mechanisms limit sensitive information to designated people.

About 200 human-resource executives, managers, and other employees use the portal to maintain employee personnel records and to view reports. Several hundred IT department staffers use the portal to monitor the systems and networks at each of the appliance manufacturer's facilities.

Probably the most time-consuming part of designing the portal, Nall and Fowler say, is working with each business unit to determine what kind of information each unit needs. "On a typical intranet, information overload and irrelevancy is overwhelming," Nall says. "We don't want to have that problem on the portal, so we have defined owners for content who are responsible for review of information to ensure it's not only accurate, but current."

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