The Best Portals Fade into Other Apps

That Gibbs finds a professional networking channel at The Maids Home Services portal is not surprising. It meshes with the long-standing promise of portals: helping companies use the Web to extend existing applications and discover new ones.

"Portals allow you to push a lot of investment in back-end systems and dumb it down" for end users, says Nate Root, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester. You could not, in fact, make a business case for the portal separate from the apps that run with it.

Wojciechowski says Menasha built its first portal with some internal "venture capital" he got from the board to develop an e-commerce strategy, but he always saw it as a tool for taking costs out of the supply chain. Some of those costs?such as time spent on the phone chasing down order information?have come out of the customer’s operations as well as Menasha’s. That’s helping the company retain customers and even increase revenue. Wojciechowski says he’s spent about $1.2 million on the portal so far, and he figures the company has gained about $1.4 million in new business?about 2 percent of revenue from portal users. Overall, the company, which logged just under $1 billion in net sales in 2001, saw business decline 6 percent.

At Pratt & Whitney, Longo counts the portal as part of the company’s IT infrastructure and says he can’t specify a return on the investment. Instead, he talks about the return the company gets from specific applications that run on the portal, such as the hours saved by generating online the bar-coded shipping labels suppliers need to ship parts to manufacturing plants. This and other supplier-related portal applications save Pratt 650 hours a month on receiving and warehousing operations. Meanwhile, at The Maids, Vola justified his portal project based on how much it would reduce the cost of mailing paper documents.

Anania says she’ll measure the success of Cigna’s portal through customer satisfaction surveys and by comparing usage of the portal with "what we were accustomed to seeing relative to hits on the homepage." But the impact on the bottom line will be harder to measure. "We expect it will help us with retention," she says, but customer retention is hard to attribute to any one factor. "If it’s been running at a steady state level and it improves, [I’m] confident the portal contributed to that."