It took Fonder the better part of a year to convince her colleagues a portal could help the company use information more effectively. She made the sale by writing a demo that showed them examples of the applications and data a portal could deliver. "This [portal] was a fairly inexpensive way to get information for people more quickly," she says.

Portal as a Customer Connection

While Maysteel has focused on improving internal efficiency with its portal, two other companies?employee benefits administrator Cigna and Pratt & Whitney?are using portals to attract new customers.

At Philadelphia-based Cigna, Executive Vice President and CIO Andrea Anania claims hers is the first company to integrate data from multiple health-care and retirement benefit plans, and that providing this information through its portal, MyCigna.com, will help the company increase its market share.

In October, Cigna announced that its customer base would drop between 4 percent and 5 percent by January. Patrick Welch, president of Cigna Healthcare, told investors that problems with an ongoing legacy systems upgrade had contributed to the loss. At the same time, Cigna said it had lost some new customers after raising prices on previously set contracts. Anania says the corporate HR departments that choose health insurers and 401(k) plan administrators look for vendors that offer robust employee self-service.

"It takes work off [HR representatives’] desks and makes the benefits package more visible to the employee," and that, Anania says, makes Cigna more attractive. According to Cigna’s market research, many workers would manage their health and retirement benefits more actively if they had "adequate online tools." By early September, 348,000 of Cigna’s 14.9 million customers had signed up for the portal that went online in June.

CIO Peter Longo of East Hartford, Conn.-based Pratt & Whitney is using a portal to help his company capture more repair business from customers that buy its jet engines. A division of manufacturing behemoth United Technologies, Pratt has a corporate portal that, during the past two years, has grown to support up to 4,000 employees, suppliers and customers using more than 100 applications. Among them is an application that helps the company reduce by 30 percent the time it takes to overhaul an engine. Pratt is using the improvement as a selling point to expand the engine-repair business, a $37.8 billion market in 2002, according to Denver-based consultancy Strand Associates. (Pratt declines to share market data but says it has manufactured 41 percent of the jet engines currently in service worldwide.)