Eric Whitton, Manager of Systems and Technology for Covenant Transport, Inc., recently bought the Nexus Portal from Business Computer Design, and it is fast becoming the dashboard for all the company's desktops. Trucking giant Covenant Transport reported $582.5 million in sales last year and covered over 100 million miles of highway with 3,800 tractors and almost 8,000 trailers.
Over the span of 18 months, Whitton occasionally discussed corporate portals with his staff of nine RPG programmers and one manager at weekly IT department meetings at headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee. With 728 users on an iSeries model 825 who were increasingly given access to new browser-based applications, Whitton sought easier ways to perform searches for documents that pertained to customer shipments and to access growing layers of Web-based, Windows, and iSeries programs. Said Whitton, "I was looking for a place to put the Web applications that we were developing. Users had to talk to an IT person to find out where to go to find their Web-based applications."
As the momentum behind the portal project increased, IBM was invited to make a presentation on its portal products. At the end of IBM's presentation, Whitton realized, "I couldn't sell it to management because it was going to cost a lot of money. After licenses, maintenance, training, and other costs, I could have spent a quarter of a million dollars." Further, if he included external users in the license (the 4,000 drivers who might access the portal from the road), per-user fees would apply. Exclaimed Whitton, "This is a low-margin business!"
Nexus Was Free
In one of the weekly staff meetings, a programmer brought in an ad for BCD's Nexus portal and showed it to Whitton. In stark contrast to the pricing of IBM's solution, the ad declared that Nexus, normally priced at $12,000, was free through a special promotion-- only the annual software maintenance fee was due. "The free thing definitely caught our attention. To me, that said, 'You are not taking a chance; you might as well get this thing and try it.' "
An ROI Shortcut
Although cost-justifying the purchase of new software--or any other asset--is a standard business practice, Whitton said, "I couldn't promise to management that if they gave me $100,000 dollars, I would save them $200,000. IBM could do that, but I couldn't. If I had all the money that vendors promised me in ROIs, we could get out of the trucking business and just buy software. With Nexus being as inexpensive as it was, we really didn't have to worry about it."
All in all, Covenant spent $3,500 on Nexus. They have two licenses because Covenant's production iSeries model 825 is mirrored to a model 830 for high availability. The fee covered software maintenance on these two systems.
Nexus, now in Release 2, is an iSeries-centric portal that delivers key productivity tools to Covenant Transport's system users through a common browser interface that can easily be customized to fit their specific desktop needs. It makes secured and controlled access to applications easy; has customized portlets to let users launch Web-, Windows-, or legacy iSeries-based applications; and includes to-do lists and interactive calendars for individuals, departments, and the organization. Through the new Nexus Web Object Warehouse (WOW), Covenant users can also search for, retrieve, or distribute iSeries reports and PDF, Excel, or Word documents. In 2004, Nexus earned IBM's ServerProven Certification and won top honors for a Web Enabling Tool in Search400's Products of the Year event. Said Whitton, "Version 2 of Nexus is very evolved. It had a lot of things we wanted, like validation against the 400's authority tables. We already had a network ID and password and a 400 ID and password, and we didn't want yet a third place for users to log on."
Rollout
Whitton planned to deploy static pages like phone directories, calendars, and bulletin boards first, and he showed department managers how to update content for their areas. "I was very adamant about not wanting my programmers to become content owners. I wanted department people to manage their own content. We are just giving them a place to put it," he explained. Nexus allows him to set group user authorization, which enables department managers to establish and maintain only their own content.
So far, Whitton and his team have loaded the portal with an imaging system that facilitates instant access to shipping documents; a system that runs frequently requested iSeries reports with a simple mouse-click; and an internal job board that lets Covenant employees click on a job, view a complete job description, and apply for jobs. According to Whitten, "The imaging application was an emergency. Our other in-house-developed imaging system quit working when we upgraded our core business application. I had plans to Web-enable this application anyway, and when the other imaging system stopped working, I developed the new one that was Web-based." Whitten develops Web applications and portlets in WebSphere's IDE and deploys them in the WebSphere Express WAS. "People are hitting it pretty heavily right now. Nexus makes it real easy to access."
Once fully implemented, system users will have instant access to Covenant's dispatch and billing system, which was originally developed by QUALCOMM. "We are in the middle of development. We have rolled out pieces. I would also like to let customers log on, but this would be a whole separate Nexus site."
Whitton commented that his overall experience with Nexus and BCD has been very satisfactory. "We had a little problem with Nexus; I think we are the product's biggest user. We ran a couple buffers out of memory. When I called support, they jumped on it. They are pretty good."
At Covenant Transport, Nexus improves the presentation of information, integrates disparate business applications, facilitates collaboration between workers within departments and between departments, and simplifies the publishing and distribution of important business information. According to Whitton, "It's a better channel for conveying information, a better medium."
Robert Gast has written about technology and business management since 1986. He is the managing partner of Chicago area-based Evant Group and can be reached at
Business Computer Design, Int'l, Inc. (BCD)
Contact: Eric Figura, Director, Sales & Marketing
950 N. York Rd.
Hinsdale, IL 60521 2950
Telephone: 630.986.0800
Fax: 630.986.0926
Web: www.bcdsoftware.com
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