So the e-business team put together its own sales pitch. A live demonstration, in the form of a revamped corporate webpage, helped clinch the deal. Managers from 26 countries saw how they could save time and money by deploying a product selector application that was developed and maintained centrally, and use standard content management software to customize it with information about the products they sold locally.

The team also presented its case in terms that would be meaningful to the marketers. Digital Day, the Fairlawn, Ohio-based vendor that designed the site’s template, helped the Goodyear team make the sale by backing up its recommendations with research Goodyear had given the vendor about how consumers buy tires. "When [Digital Day] said, ’Organize it this way,’ there was a built-in level of confidence. They weren’t just this group of Web heads," says Traicoff.

There are some holdouts, says Nat Leonard, Goodyear’s director of global e-commerce. A manager in one country, which Leonard didn’t name, insists his logo should stay where it is on his site, and Leonard is letting him have his way. He thinks that once the resistors see that their peers are getting good business results from the project, they won’t want to be left out.

3. Keep everyone informed.

The project team kept marketing and product managers?who are in charge of providing content to the sites?informed throughout the development process. Moreira, the regional e-business manager for Latin America, says Web consolidation was a regular topic during monthly conference calls or videoconferences with managers from the nine countries in the region.

Those meetings helped the project team identify opportunities and avert mistakes. Moreira knew they would need more than one template for all the Spanish-speaking countries, since you can say tire five different ways in Spanish. If the site were only for internal use, everyone would learn the same vocabulary, says Moreira. But they couldn’t expect consumers to do the same, so the business unit ended up with templates reflecting local vocabulary for each country.

The regular consultations also led the project team to adjust the launch schedule for two business units to coincide with new marketing campaigns. The U.S. site?the first major deployment of the new infrastructure?launched the same day in September as a new advertising campaign. And the changeover for Latin American sites was timed to coincide with a November product launch.

4. Measure ROI, and report results.

Within a few weeks, Leonard expects operational data to show improvements such as higher uptime for servers and lower expenses for content management. The project should pay for itself in a year and has already shown "the value of economies of scale," Berg says. "We were able to shift funding away from back-end infrastructure and licensing agreements and spend more on the applications and the presentation."