Sept. 11, 2000

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Take My Post-It, Please And Electronic Paper, Too

By Alorie Gilbert

he company known as 3M Co. prides itself on being an innovative company. After all, it invented the ubiquitous yellow Post-it Notes. Now it's helping Xerox Corp. develop electronic "paper" for the creation of digital magazines, newspapers, and books with moving images and continuously updated content.

The $15.66 billion St. Paul, Minn., company also applies innovative thinking to other areas of IT. 3M has embraced the Internet to streamline relationships with dealers, customers, and suppliers, as well as to improve the flow of information among its internal business divisions. But managing and directing the internal IT and E-business projects of 40 business divisions operating in 200 countries is a monumental task. "When a revolution such as E-business hits, it provides so many opportunities," CIO David Drew says. "That leads to a real challenge--trying to balance a cultural instinct for innovation with practical success."

So far the balancing act is working. The company has built a common foundation of IT tools and infrastruc-ture to support the E-business initiatives of its many divisions. Within that foundation is a digital media repository storing information and images about all 50,000 products the company sells, and a data warehouse that stores all sales, financial, inventory, planning, product, and customer data.

These repositories result in complete, consistent content about products, orders, and customers for each E-business project. Those efforts include 150 extra nets and links to various E-marketplaces and reseller

Web sites that serve health-care, pharmaceutical, automotive, office-supply, electronics, and industrial-products industries. "Because of our diversity, we have to be a lot of different places because our customers are a lot of places," says Drew.

3M has created an extranet called DealerHut to manage relationships with unauthorized distribution channels. Unauthorized distributors are generally too small to purchase the large quantities necessary to order directly from 3M, and are forced to buy products through other distributors. 3M built the system using Digital River Inc.'s E-Reseller Network System.

Its authorized resellers handle much of 3M's consumer transactions and product fulfillment, both of which are typical stumbling blocks for manufacturers. The company is working with its resellers to create co-branded, online showrooms. There, 3M can control how its products are portrayed and gather valuable data about customers.

The company built its first showroom with Charlottesville, Va., online office-products retailer Value America Inc. The site is dedicated to 3M's line of ergonomic products such as wrist rests and adjustable keyboard trays. "It's important to have information that differentiates us and utilizes our brand," says Drew. "Brand is as important in the E-business world as in the offline world."

Efficient business communication is another important function of IT at 3M. The company communicates with its suppliers, transportation carriers, and banks almost entirely through electronic means such as electronic data interchange and the Web.

The company is also engaged in collaborative product development with customers and suppliers via the Internet and has deployed a demand-planning system from i2 Technologies Inc. to lower inventory and tighten the production cycle. It uses a PeopleSoft Inc. enterprise resource planning system to create business-process efficiency and consistency in purchasing, human resources, and accounting departments, and it has deployed intranet applications to lower internal administrative costs.

Return to main story, "World Beyond The Assembly Line"

Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher

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