Internet helps firms snuggle-up to customers

By ADAM GIFFORD

Peoplesoft chief executive Craig Conway calls them "real time enterprises" - meaning those groups that use the internet to get closer to their suppliers and customers.

He told a Peoplesoft leadership forum in Sydney last week that integrating enterprise applications (the day-to-day management and accounting software that runs a company) delivered lower internal costs and changed the way companies did business, when they were run on the internet.

It is a process that can have startling effects. Rubber manufacturer SSL, the world's largest maker of condoms, reduced its global demand forecasting process to four hours by putting its order and inventory management applications on the internet.

Software giant BEA found similar gains when it moved its supply chain, financial and human resource operations to the internet.

It reduced the process from taking an order to to issuing an invoice from 10 days to two, and expects to increase its operating income by US$54 million ($108.4 million) over the next three years.

Conway said the real-time enterprise needed to standardise its business processes and deploy an internet architecture that allowed its customers, suppliers, employees and partners access using any web device.

The company's software, Peoplesoft 8, was one of the first to achieve this by moving all the business logic to the server, so users needed only a standard web browser to access the applications.

It took Peoplesoft US$500 million to rewrite all its code, but Conway said the benefit could be seen in the last financial year when the company's sales grew 19 per cent in a flat market.

Peoplesoft chief information officer David Thompson said that because it now delivered its applications through the browser, Peoplesoft was now concentrating on identifying what users needed to do their jobs, rather than loading applications with functions that would never be used.

He said web-based applications made it easier to being in services in real time.

In many cases that allowed staff to have access to information from outside that they might not have had before.

He said pure internet architectures made application service provider (ASP), or software for rent businesses more viable.

* Adam Gifford visited Sydney as a guest of Peoplesoft.