Con-Way customers now perform 500,000 status queries and 300,000 other transactions online each month, Barretta says, and Con-Way’s call center volume has dropped between 12 percent and 25 percent. The company has also shaved 2.5 days off its average accounts receivable days outstanding, and Barretta believes integration has played a role in getting the money in faster. "[Customers] can easily see what their outstanding balances are, and they can drill down to the detailed level of justification for those balances," she says. Therefore they’re more likely to get their billing questions answered more quickly and, in turn, pay more quickly.

Integration has big benefits for the IT department too, Barretta says. "[Thanks to the data warehouse, employees and customers can] generate many of their own reports, instead of relying on IT to build them." The enterprise portal has also eased maintenance and support burdens: All the applications are built in the same architecture so that the IT staff doesn’t have to support different ones. And "users have fewer questions, after they get used to the applications, because the systems are more intuitive and all function alike," she says.

Over the years, Barretta has found that the best way to drive support for an integration effort is to leave her calculator behind and focus on the concrete: How much time users say they will save thanks to the new connectivity, what new revenue streams they say they will be able to tap because of it and so on. "ROI has more credibility when it’s stated in raw benefits, which are sometimes nonquantifiable, rather than translated into dollars," she says. "That translation is often fuzzy and tends to lose some audiences."