Each year at DCI's Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference, customers and their solution providers compete in the Portal Excellence Awards. At the November 2005 event in Miami, winners were announced in four categories: Best Customer or Partner Portal, Best Employee Portal, Best Content Management System and Best Knowledge Management System.
As conference chair, I led the judges' panel. The other judges were Clive Finkelstein of Information Engineering Services, Shawn Shell of Consejo Inc. and Zach Wahl of Project Performance Corporation. The judges evaluated the return on investment, architectural design and innovation of each customer implementation.
Best Customer or Partner Portal
The finalists for the Best Customer or Partner Portal were Lockheed Martin Aeronautics (solution provider was Lockheed Martin Aeronautics) and Exempla Healthcare (solution provider was BroadVision). The winner was Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics (Winner)Lockheed Martin's Supply Chain Integration (SCI) portal was developed to address the needs for improved visibility and collaboration between buyers and suppliers of manufactured aerospace parts during the procurement-to-delivery process. With thousands of parts ordered and delivered each week, the current status of ordered parts is crucial to maintain aircraft-build flow rates.
The SCI portal helps manage more than 230,000 purchase order line items annually, representing a recurring inventory of approximately $500 million. Suppliers are directly involved in the purchase order management process, and they are contracted to update the delivery information themselves. Instead of several hundred buyers trying to input and manage all of this data themselves each week, they are now supplemented by hundreds of suppliers updating the delivery information at the point where those delivery decisions are made.
With improved visibility for both the buyer and supplier into parts deliveries, reliance on excess inventory is reduced. This inventory management improvement has saved $3.2 million to date. An additional $9 million in inventory is estimated to be removed over the next five years.
There are currently 626 buyers and internal staff, plus 817 supplier employees using the SCI portal. The supplier employees represent 368 separate supplier companies that, in turn, represent 76 percent of the total number of purchase orders being managed at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.
Lockheed Martin developed its own J2EE-based portal application because no commercial package could fully support its needs. Integration between a state-of-the-art portal application and a 20-year-old legacy mainframe application posed many challenges, and this is one reason why a custom-built portal approach was used.
Exempla Healthcare (Finalist)
Exempla Healthcare is a three-hospital system and a provider network based in Denver, Colorado. The Exempla clinical portal provides caregivers with secure Web access to patient-care applications, including those in existing enterprise systems. Single sign-on (SSO) was a key requirement for the portal, and today the portal delivers 15 applications with SSO.
The portal uses personalization capabilities to tailor content and provide information relevant to each of the physicians using the system. Customized information delivery also allows hospital committees to conduct virtual meetings and notify users of critical or abnormal lab results. The portal makes extensive use of collaboration and supports 42 micro-sites for e-committees and communities of interest. Over 1,400 different policies and procedures are published through the portal.
Each of the clinicians using the system can access patient files while working at other area medical facilities. Also, the electronic sign-off of charts saves travel time and can be accomplished from any location with browser access. The portal provides tracking and audit information for HIPAA compliance requirements and surpasses regulatory requirements for high availability. As a result, the portal has reduced physician workload by 30 hours per month, reduced the time to perform administrative functions by 65 percent and reduced delinquent charts by 25 percent.
The greatest growth was from the new employee portal, which enhances the clinician's portal experience and ties in the extended treatment team. With the integration of email (Microsoft Outlook) and a skills inventory tracking system, the number of employees using the portal grew from 2,280 to 6,000.
Exempla's clinician portal was built using the BroadVision Portal and the BroadVision One-to-One Content for Web content management.
Best Employee Portal
The finalists for the Best Employee Portal were HCR Manor Care (solution provider was HCR Manor Care) and American Airlines (solution provider was Plumtree Software). The winner was HCR Manor Care.
HCR Manor Care (Winner)
The goals of the HCR employee portal are to empower employees to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. It does this by focusing on continuous process improvement, rather than on just the efficient delivery of information. Three components are used to achieve this. The first is the business process portal, which is used for organizing, indexing and displaying content by business process, subprocess and step. The second component publishes key business indicators (KBIs), and the third component is a continuous process improvement facility that prompts the owners of high-performance KBIs to share their ideas for improving business processes. Underlying these three core components are a content management system and associated topic taxonomy, an enterprise search engine, and a portal security and user interface framework.
One important aspect in the design of the content management system was to support the publishing, viewing, indexing and filtering of content by business process. Users find all the content they need by asking the question, "What do I need to do right now?" instead of, "Where do I find X, Y and Z to support what I am doing?" In addition to organizing all the content by business process, the portal produces KBIs that measure the efficiency and effectiveness of those processes.
The current portal user base extends throughout the company. Several thousand users employ the portal for gathering information and company news, connecting to application resources, executing business processes and locating key documents such as forms, manuals, policies, procedures and reports.
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