Supplier collaboration top priority for large manufacturing firms
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Collaborating with your partners and suppliers through web-based portal solutions has come out as the number one priority for manufacturing companies in an e-business survey last month, with customer-focussed portal solutions and internal staff productivity intranets a close second and third on the agenda. Dean Palmer reports
Collaborating with your partners and suppliers through web-based portal solutions has come out as the number one priority for manufacturing companies in an e-business survey last month, with customer-focussed portal solutions and internal staff productivity intranets a close second and third on the agenda.
The research, conducted in June this year by IT infrastructure giant Sun Microsystems’ e-business software division, Sun One, across 144 IT managers of UK manufacturing firms, found that 64% of companies already had some kind of portal strategy in place. And when asked how many respondents actually had some form of portal in place at the present time, supplier collaboration portals came out on top with 30% of firms using this type of solution.
A close second was customer portals (26%) and then internal employee productivity solutions with 19%.
When asked what benefits users expected to see from portal implementations, the majority pointed to productivity improvements, reducing costs and increasing their revenue as the most likely benefits, followed by service level enhancements and increasing their share of a customer’s business.
The telephone interviews were conducted across manufacturing companies in the Top 1000 list.
Sun One’s business solutions manager Simon Holloway, comments on the findings: “We’ve learned from the survey that manufacturing companies are looking at portal enablement of their existing legacy applications as a means of collaborating with their suppliers and partners.
“We were surprised at the number of companies that were already or planning to use supplier portals or web services in the near future… Our objective now is to develop our general architecture into tailored product suites for the manufacturing sector and other verticals. That means we need to identify niche partners and search for appropriate systems integrators who can help us provide solutions in these areas.”
Sun already has good relationships with most of the major consultants (Accenture, KPMG and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young) and has partnerships in place with SAP, Siebel and i2, so it remains to be seen who the company partners with next after this latest survey.
