Built From Scratch

Marino chose this sales team as the portal pilot because it was working with a Frito-Lay client that Marino says is an industry leader in marketing, product promotions and merchandising. The sales team was dispersed across the country, making it ideal for determining whether the portal would succeed in bridging geographic boundaries when it came to sharing internal information.

Based on input from the pilot team, Marino’s group established three goals for the Frito-Lay portal: to streamline knowledge, exploit customer-specific data and foster team collaboration. He brought in Navigator Systems, a consultancy based in Dallas, which has worked with Frito-Lay in the past and had some experience building knowledge management portals. Navigator built a prototype in about three months using technologies previously approved by Frito-Lay’s IS department, including Lotus Domino, BusinessObjects’ WebIntelligence, Java and IBM’s DB2 database. Since there was no advanced search engine in use at the company, Navigator’s consultants recommended a tool called Autonomy, a natural language search engine that allows users to search information in different repositories such as intranet sites, PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets, says Todd Price, the principal consultant at Navigator who worked on the implementation. "The search engine enabled the person to get to all the disparate data sets through one view," explains Marino.

Marino and Price essentially had to start from scratch when it came to populating the portal. "Never before at Frito-Lay had they tried to capture expertise systematically in one place," notes Price. Marino and Price did an audit within the company and then created expertise profiles on the portal so that sales staff in the field would have an easy way to learn who’s who at headquarters in Plano. That way, people who have expertise in areas such as promotion planning, activity planning, costing or new product announcements can be readily tracked down and contacted for information. "In a large organization, that’s critical, because there’s a wealth of knowledge. But for someone new in the field it takes a lot of tries to figure out who they are," Price says.

Security was also a big concern because the pilot team would be working with confidential client information. The particular customer supported by the pilot team "had custom information about sales performance that they shared with members of the Frito-Lay team, but we were contracted not to let that information get outside the team that worked with that customer," says Marino. His group built the portal so that different sections of it were password-protected, ensuring that only the pertinent users could get to the confidential information.