Bruce Strand, CEO with Strand Associates, says using Web-based management tools has become common in the jet-engine industry as manufacturers try to win ongoing revenue from airlines’ maintenance and repair business.

Pratt’s Longo notes that just as car owners can choose to get a tune-up from a local mechanic rather than the dealer, airlines don’t have to return their engines to Pratt for regular maintenance. Many airlines, he says, have their own overhaul shops, and they choose whether to do the work in-house, send it back to the manufacturer or use a third party based on cost and time. By viewing the maintenance status of their engines through the portal, airline customers and Pratt engineers can make quicker decisions about whether to wait for one of an engine’s 28,000 parts to be refurbished or to install a new one.

"The customer is required to make these sorts of decisions about 100 times per engine," says Colin Karsten, a client services manager at Pratt. The quicker these decisions are made, the sooner the multimillion-dollar engine is ready to fly again, saving the airline the cost of keeping its plane grounded.

If Pratt & Whitney can get repairs done faster than its competitors, it expects to get a larger share of the repair business. And the company is using its portals to get there.

That’s not to say that portals aren’t still doing what they’ve done for years: connecting employees with headquarters. Longo says Pratt & Whitney’s portal is helping the company get more use from its SAP investment. One example: Engineers?who, like lawyers, charge their time to specific projects?used to have to be at the office to fill out their time sheets in the company’s SAP system. But these engineers do a lot of traveling. Now that they can access the system from outside the firewall through the portal, the company’s personnel and project cost records are more accurate. While time sheet scorekeeping is not a big business problem, Longo says, the application is popular with staffers.

A Portal Makes a Good Application Factory

Although the portal-based applications like those at Pratt & Whitney and Cigna sound elegant, they didn’t arrive there overnight. Anania laid the groundwork for Cigna’s portal during the past three years, as the company invested in a shared e-commerce infrastructure. During this period, each business unit was developing its own Web-based applications that then had to be integrated into the portal. In the future, Anania will be able to use the portal to deliver common applications to customers of each business unit. Up next: instant messaging between consumers and Cigna service representatives.