Expanding the pie
Besides making current customers happier, Buehler and other Eastman executives expect that e-business will help the company find new customers. So far, Buehler said, most online transactions are cannibalisations of other sales channels. This year, the goal is to grow sales substantially without stealing sales from other channels.
The wizards are one step; another is developing local language content sitesââ,¬"first for Latin America and then for Europe and Asia.
Finding new customers is driving increases in e-business investments at many enterprises. Health-care insurer Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, for example, is working to enhance its Web site to support automatic account establishment and next-day issuance of membership cards. Turning those processes into Web-based, self-service operations, said Senior Vice President and CIO Charles Emery, will not only cut operating costs but, more important, also make Horizon more attractive to smaller employers. "The more we can take what we do behind the firewall and move it outside, transaction processingwise, the stronger our Web efforts will be," Emery said.
Opening many of its core processes to the Web won't be cheap for Horizon. Emery's budget for e-business initiatives is twice what it was last yearââ,¬"$40 million. It's a lot of cash, but necessary, Emery said, if Horizon is to cash in on IT investments and strategies that began to take shape several years ago and are intended to allow the company to use its Web site to bring doctors, patients, employers and insurance providers together.
"We're going to have a more active rollout on the Net this year," Emery said. "We spent so much of 1999 and 2000 building up back-office systems for Y2K that now we've laid the building blocks."
Like Emery, Eastman's Buehler is pouring much of his e-business investment into improving integration between e-commerce and back-end systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning). The company's online wizards, for example, tie into information in its SAP AG ERP system.
Another part of the integration strategy is to create deeper online connections between Eastman's ERP systems and those of its suppliers and even their suppliers. Already, the company has deployed 15 private business-to-business extranets linking it to key suppliers. The next step is to extend those links to include the Eastman suppliers' own suppliers, using middleware from WebMethod.(Eastman took an equity stake in WebMethods 18 months ago.) Buehler's goal is to have at least one of those B2B extranets integrated from supplier to store shelf by the end of the year.
