In September 1999, Intel formed a leadership team comprised of senior managers from the CS group to help drive the implementation of a new e‑Business program as well as the cultural change necessary for its widespread acceptance. This effort is expected to continue through 2002.

The e‑Business plan involves moving key facilities‑related activities, such as tracking internal customer orders, onto the Internet through a process aimed at eliminating unnecessary work for Intel employees and lowering the cost of doing business. While many CS functions will land on the Web, the objective of the program is to simplify business processes for the 4,500 CS employees worldwide, according to Jim Prangley, the Intel program manager heading up the Corporate Services transition to the Internet.

Creating an easy‑to‑understand program for all CS employees to use has been a challenge given their diverse functions: facilities operations, corporate real estate, strategic planning, construction, information systems, public affairs, security, environmental health, and others.

"We are embracing e‑Business to help us improve productivity, simplify our business practices, and make it easier to do business with us and within our organization. By eliminating unnecessary steps, we can improve our service to customers and reduce our costs," says Prangley. "One of the most difficult tasks has been getting everyone to realize that e‑Business does not mean simply moving the way we do business today onto the Internet. It means reviewing our practices, improving them, then further enabling them through technology."

Finding Best‑Known Methods

Streamlining internal business processes makes sense for Intel, which conducted approximately $30 billion in sales on the Internet last year and has about 800 offices and 80,000 employees worldwide. Corporate Services employees currently use various client‑server databases running 25 different applications to access information necessary to do their jobs and take care of customers on a daily basis. Locating the information is often time‑consuming, and sometimes the data fall short of what's needed to complete their work.

"Seventy percent of our e‑Business initiative is about creating a single way to perform a job by determining and proliferating best‑known methods (BKMs)," explains Prangley. "We have about 15 to 20 CS facilities around the world, and while they share a lot of methods, most of them don't share BKMs. We have to look at all of the different known methods by which a job is performed across Corporate Services, determine the BKM, then either take it to the Internet or optimize and standardize the business process."

The BKM is often the process that produces the greatest return on investment because it is the most cost‑effective way to complete a job. For example, Intel's implementation of Maximo has gone from many different versions on multiple platforms to a BKM with a single platform and all sites running the same release. Other applications used by CS have been consolidated into a single product, instead of four or five.

Recognizing that the corporation cannot do everything, Prangley says Intel is targeting areas of greatest return. With speed a critical factor, Intel is focusing on 80‑percent solutions that take three months to complete rather than 90‑percent or 100‑percent solutions that take nine to 12 months to finish.

Defining Portal and Storefront

Two e‑Business components--the CS Portal and the CS Storefront--are vital to the success of the program, serving as access points to the internal Web site for two distinct audiences: CS personnel and the Intel population at large.

The portal, available to all 4,500 CS employees (including engineers and technicians), offers job‑specific information, company links, reporting tools, and frequently used business applications that allow individuals to do their work more efficiently. Chat groups and discussion forums facilitate collaborative work. Employees can customize their portal by selecting the type of information they want to receive, adding or removing different features at the touch of a button. (To date, more than half of the CS employees have customized the CS Portal to meet their daily business needs.)

"We don't want people to scramble around to six or seven Web sites collecting data for their desktops," says Prangley. "The intent here is to give them the information they need from one site."

The more elaborate storefront provides information to the entire Intel population about all Corporate Services' offerings. The storefront fulfills four key functions: allowing employees to retrieve information on CS products and services, place an order, check on its status, and provide feedback to the service‑owner.

"CS provides more than 500 services to the 80,000 Intel population, and we want them to be able to go to the storefront and request services from us in a one‑stop shopping scenario," notes Prangley. "Business groups are inundated with data, and they often spend too much time surfing the intranet maze for something they might not find. We're counting on the portal and storefront to drive customers to our e‑Business model."

Rev Zero, or the first draft, of the portal was launched in July 2000. V1.0 of the storefront launched in April 2001, with V2.0 planned for the fourth quarter. Prangley says V2.0 of the portal has been deployed, and Intel is preparing to launch V3.0 later this year.

Other Key Tools

While the e‑Business program is a CS initiative, Prangley stresses that Intel's Information Systems and Information Technology groups are playing valuable roles in the implementation. The IT infrastructure supports the integration of the portals and storefront, as well as the introduction of workflow automation.

According to Prangley, Workflow is a revolutionary, off‑the‑shelf tool to automate business processes on the Web. The Workflow software automates procedures where documents, information, or tasks are passed from one participant (or system) to another. For example, if a worker wants to move to a different office, a request is made on the storefront and the entire process is managed on the portal--everything from ordering the packing boxes to requesting manpower to transport the boxes.

In addition to keeping a record of work‑related activities and tasks done on a daily basis, in the future employees will be able to proactively report life events through the portal. They will be able to update information about themselves, such as marriage, the birth of a child, or the receipt of a degree, into the appropriate databases, instead of waiting to receive the proper forms from the payroll or human resources departments.

The introduction of additional tools will make the CS portal even more functional. For instance, advanced search capabilities will make it easier for employees to locate and categorize information, especially when sifting through multiple sources of data. Content management technology, along with the establishment of stringent guidelines for managing and revising document content, will tame the tangle of the estimated three million business documents--many of them outdated--stored on the intranet. Also in demand is Decision Support Systems software for the latest information reporting capability.

Promoting the Program

Prangley emphasizes that proper marketing has been essential to garner support for the e‑Business transition. CS has established an e‑Business marketing and communications team, which publishes a monthly employee newsletter to generate interest in the e‑Business program. Valuable details are also funneled through the content‑rich CS e‑Business Web site.

To help people feel comfortable using the Internet as a business tool, the CS e‑Business team has routinely sponsored such incentives as Web scavenger hunts, awarding prizes to employees while they search for job‑related information. Pens, t‑shirts, and posters bearing the logo, "e‑Business IS the business," regularly remind employees about the importance of the program.

Prangley points out that e‑Business works best when employees embrace the program and are pleased with the results, especially in light of their heavy workload and frequent information overload.

Lessons Learned

Emphasizing that any e‑Business initiative needs upfront buy‑in from senior management, Prangley also cautions against adopting technology that doesn't focus on meeting customer requirements or solving specific problems.

"We've learned that e‑Business is not about technology," he says. "It's about changing your business practices, then enabling those practices through the Web."

Intel learned a hard lesson about how extensive its computer infrastructure must be in order to sustain an e‑Business program on a worldwide basis.

"The storefront works very well if you're in the U.S., but in countries such as Ireland, an employee request for service first goes to a server in Arizona and then back to Ireland before the customer sees a response," explains Prangley. "The network delay is an industry‑wide problem because of the cost of private network bandwidth overseas."

To resolve performance issues, Intel has plans to deploy e‑Business hubs--a set of Web, database, and application servers that support specific geographic areas--in the Pacific Northwest and the Middle East by the end of 2002. These multiple installations also offer redundancy for the entire system. A hub in Ireland will support Europe, while one in Penang, located off the coast of Malaysia, will support Asia. A hub is also planned for Israel.

"We realized that in order to be successful with our storefront, we need to centrally manage the e‑Business hubs, but distribute them in a global fashion," he says.

What's Next for Corporate Services?

Establishing an operational excellence (OE) program to monitor and move the e‑Business effort forward is next on the CS agenda. The OE program will help Intel gauge its operating costs before and after implementing e‑Business initiatives. The big goals for this year are to integrate all of the processes and convince employees and customers that e‑Business is the best way to do business today.

"It's a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make them simple," says Prangley. "We've put an awful lot of complexity into our environments and facilities, and as we go through this, we're seeing lots of opportunities to simplify the business. We believe e‑Business can help us in this regard. In fact, e‑Business IS the business, and we continue to hammer that home to our employees and customers."

By Tracy Carbasho

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