Client successes with collaborative solutions from IBM. How IBM® Workplace™ and Lotus software transforms business for SAP customersfor SAP customers

SAP integration solutions
To support your business objectives

Client successes with collaborative solutions from IBM.
How IBM ® Workplace ™ and Lotus software transforms business for SAP customers

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CONTENTS: BY NAME BY GEOGRAPHY BY INDUSTRY

GET MORE fROM YOUR SAP INvESTMENTS
By choosing SAP applications, you’ve already taken important steps to optimize your business
operations. With IBM® Workplace™ and Lotus® software products as well as IBM’s extensive
experience implementing and supporting SAP solutions for clients, you can further increase organi-
zational productivity and effectiveness as you extend and complement your SAP investments.

Rely on IBM Workplace and Lotus software products to:

• Integrate SAP applications with other applications.
• Add personalization, collaboration and document management capabilities.
• Create new business processes and functions quickly and flexibly.
• Increase user and development productivity as you reduce costs.

IBM ® Workplace™ for SAP ® Software is an offering that complements and provides extended
functionality for SAP and non-SAP applications. By integrating key business functions into a
single contextual view, streamlining processes and simplifying collaboration, the IBM Workplace
for SAP Software offering can help to dramatically enhance employee productivity and enable
greater innovation across your organization.

The IBM Workplace for SAP Software offering does this by providing tools and capabilities that
help enable rapid composition of new business processes. SAP and non-SAP systems can be
integrated faster, and they also are enriched with new functions such as e-forms, dashboards,
scorecards, alerting, document and content management, instant messaging, team rooms and
presence awareness.

(Continued on next page)

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The tools and capabilities provided by the Workplace for SAP Software offering help you:

• Improve usability and time to value in creating new business processes.
• Simplify collaboration.
• Enable better decision making.
• Reduce costs.

IBM Lotus Notes® software now offers Lotus Notes access for SAP solutions. These are solu-
tions that are specifically designed to make it easier for employees to access the information they
need to improve their productivity and reduce costs. Integrate and extend the productivity capa-
bilities of the Lotus Notes application into SAP business processes, and integrate and expand
SAP into Lotus Notes software. Incorporate common business tasks such as:

• Calendering.
• Time tracking.
• Contact management.
• Report generation.
• Approval workflows.


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IBM WebSphere ® Portal Version 6.0 software can increase organizational productivity and
responsiveness by integrating new and existing business solutions more quickly across the
enterprise — by user community or job role. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 software provides:

• Orchestrated workflow enhancements to implement business processes through portals.
• Templates to build, deploy and revise portals faster.
• New tools like IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory software to quickly build business services that
integrate with SAP software.

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Version 6.0 software makes it fast and easy to create, cus-
tomize, deploy and maintain robust portlets and composite applications that leverage existing
SAP business processes and data.

• Create enterprise quality, custom portlets easily, enabling users to search, view, sort, create,
update and delete SAP data.
• Allow business users and end users to personalize and customize their SAP applications.
• Create a richly integrated portal experience by enabling portlets to interact as they access data
from disparate databases and systems.

The following success stories demonstrate what IBM software makes possible. They describe
how IBM clients solved demanding, real-world business challenges — and reaped real results —
by incorporating IBM Workplace software into their enterprise SAP environments.

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CLIENT GEOGRAPHY INDUSTRY PAGE
Belgacom Group Europe Telecommunications 8

Brady Corporation North America Manufacturing 14

Broward County Schools North America Education 21

DaimlerChrysler Europe and North America Automotive 31

Discovery Communications North America Media and entertainment 38

Eicher Asia Automotive 46

Elektra Comercial North America Retail 54

Gemeente Twenterand Europe Government 62

Kempchen Dichtungstechnik Europe Manufacturing 67

M.J. Maillis Group Europe and North America Manufacturing 73

Michel Thierry Europe Automotive 78

Nextra Europe Banking and financial 91

OKI Europe Europe Electronics 98

Petrolóleos de Venezuela South America Petrochemical 103

Skyworks North America Telecommunications 109

TransAlta North America Utilities 115

United Nations North America Government and public service 121

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GEOGRAPHY CLIENT INDUSTRY PAGE
Asia Eicher Automotive 46

Europe Belgacom Group Telecommunications 8

Europe and North America DaimlerChrysler Automotive 31

Europe Gemeente Twenterand Government 62

Europe Kempchen Dichtungstechnik Manufacturing 67

Europe and North America M.J. Maillis Group Manufacturing 73

Europe Michel Thierry Automotive 78

Europe Nextra Banking and financial 91

Europe OKI Europe Electronics 98

North America Brady Corporation Manufacturing 14

North America Broward County Schools Education 21

North America and Europe DaimlerChrysler Automotive 31

North America Discovery Communications Media and entertainment 38

North America Elektra Comercial Retail 54

North America and Europe M.J. Maillis Group Manufacturing 73

North America Skyworks Telecommunications 109

North America TransAlta Utilities 115

North America United Nations Government and public service 121

South America Petrolóleos de Venezuela Petrochemical 103

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INDUSTRY CLIENT GEOGRAPHY PAGE
Automotive DaimlerChrysler Europe and North America 31

Automotive Eicher Asia 46

Automotive Michel Thierry Europe 78

Banking and financial Nextra Europe 91

Education Broward County Schools North America 21

Electronics OKI Europe Europe 98

Government Gemeente Twenterand Europe 62

Government and public service United Nations North America 121

Manufacturing Brady Corporation North America 14

Manufacturing Kempchen Dichtungstechnik Europe 67

Manufacturing M.J. Maillis Group Europe and North America 73

Media and entertainment Discovery Communications North America 38

Petrochemical Petrolóleos de Venezuela South America 103

Retail Elektra Comercial North America 54

Telecommunications Belgacom Group Europe 8

Telecommunications Skyworks North America 109

Utilities TransAlta North America 115

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BELGACOM GROUP
Europe: Telecommunications

Belgacom — A leading supplier for global telecommunications solutions.

Challenge
Improve customer service and streamline business processes

Solution
Web services technology to enable multisystems integration with IBM WebSphere “We build our future on a
Portal server, SAP, PeopleSoft or Microsoft .NET systems service-oriented way of
Key Benefits
developing applications
Widening the B2B scope through Web services
and their integration on the
Web services standards.
The Web services will be
the evolution of our hub and
spoke application integration
platform.”
— René Dewil, IT strategy manager, Belgacom Group


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BELGACOM GROUP (continued)
Headquartered in Brussels, Belgacom SA is the leading supplier of global telecommunications
solutions in the Belgian market. The company is owned by the Belgian state (51 percent) and
ADSB Telecommunications (49 percent), which is an international consortium made up of SBC
(now part of ATT), Singapore Telecom, TDC and a group of investors from the financial sector.

The Belgacom Group’s services include local, intercity and international voice and data services,
cellular telephone services, satellite services, carrier services and all Internet-related services.
Its mobile subsidiary Belgacom Mobile had more than four million customers in December 2002.
Belgacom has offered Belgacom World Solutions since 1996, which cover more than 220 countries
and territories and through which customers can connect their various business centers based on
a single telecom standard. At the end of 2002, the Belgacom Group had 19,003 employees.

The need to improve customer service and streamline business processes
Some years ago, Belgacom started its Belgacom e-business Strategic Transformation (BeST)
initiative, with the goal of becoming an e-business leader in Belgium. This transformation had an
important impact for the Belgacom IT Department, which was seeking to evolve into a high per-
formance organization. By applying new technologies, like Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) and portal, to Web enable several of its internal applications, the company wanted self-
service Web applications to be integrated with its various legacy systems that managed supply
chain processes, like billing, provisioning and order fulfillment. The goal was to offer business-to-
consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) applications through its portal.


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Since early 1995, the Belgacom IT Delivery organization has used an early concept of services
by the adoption of a hub and spoke model based on BEA Tuxedo technology. A central organi-
zation and central systems have been put in place to interconnect all front-end applications or
packages through middleware software to their back-end systems and enterprise data.

Vincent Ghislain, Belgacom IT strategy manager, says, “With the emergence of new stable tech-
nologies, like J2EE and Web services, and with the vendor market tendencies to integrate them
into an application server suite of products, we believe that our hub and spoke model can evolve
in the coming years to a pure service-oriented architecture. We know it’s time to think about our
new generation of application architecture.”

Web services technology enables multisystems integration with IBM WebSphere Portal
server, SAP, PeopleSoft or .NET systems
One of Belgacom’s first goals was to provide a common Web interface integration, with security
managed by IBM Tivoli® Access Manager software, and then to begin the B2C project using
IBM WebSphere Portal server. Belgacom’s IT management team selected IBM WebSphere and
IBM WebSphere Portal software because of their unsurpassed ability to support horizontal Web
integration. The company now has more than 30 WebSphere software-based applications in
production, which run on Sun Solaris servers.


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The B2C application, which is designed to facilitate customer self-service via the Web, uses
IBM WebSphere Portal Extend software and supports more than one million households across
Belgium. The B2B and supply chain solutions were designed to provide key services to more
than 2,000 Belgacom business partners. The existing application is integrated with WebSphere
software using a proprietary middleware layer, which is based on BEA Tuxedo. Belgacom is
using IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer software as the standard development tool
for new J2EE applications.

Belgacom also uses an increasing number of Web services technologies — such as XML, HTTP,
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Java Connectors — to connect J2EE applications
with proprietary applications such as PeopleSoft, SAP and Microsoft® .NET.

“We believe the Web services standards will become pervasive in our industry. The technol-
ogy can be used to define components in application development and then to reuse these
components. Web services are the basis for a service-oriented architecture and can in such
an architecture perform many application integration functions,” says René Dewil, Belgacom IT
strategy manager.


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IBM Web services will also be used in conjunction with WebSphere software to integrate .NET
packages (Microsoft Office applications). The design of multitiered solution architectures is typi-
cally chosen to maximize the levels of data abstraction. One of the main reasons for this level of
data abstraction is to enable flexibility within the architecture to take advantage of future technolo-
gies. SOAP provides this additional interoperability capability between .NET and J2EE business
objects running on WebSphere technology.

“We build our future on a service-oriented way of developing applications and their integration on
the Web services standards,” continues Mr. Dewil. “The Web services will be the evolution of our hub
and spoke application integration platform, in which currently we use several other technologies.”

Widening the BB scope through Web services
Belgacom expects numerous benefits from its IBM Web services solutions on WebSphere
software, including the following:

• Increased customer satisfaction as well as employee productivity as a result of Web
self-service capabilities
• Increased sales over the Internet as a result of improved cross-selling capabilities, which can
incorporate personalized promotions
• Decreased integration effort between applications and packages
• Easier potential future end-to-end business processing integration


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Last and not least, with the current architecture being closely aligned to Web services, it will be a
straightforward conversion from the existing interfaces and messaging protocols to the relevant
standard technologies. So with a relatively small effort, significant gains are expected by opening
up the interface to widely accepted Internet standards.

“The use of Web services is a major part of our IT strategy; Web services will be used in our
upcoming projects and we expect them also to integrate other technologies,” states Mr. De
Backer, vice president IT.

For additional information on Belgacom, please visit:

www.belgacom.be

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BRADY CORPORATION
North America: Manufacturing

Brady goes global with SAP and IBM.

Challenge
To increase internal efficiency and improve the quality and speed of information transfer;
to gain a clear view of performance across global operations; and to code page conver- “As part of the SAP EBP
sion to exploit new SAP releases project, we were able to
Solution consolidate the number of
MySAP.com, SAP R/3, SAP BW, SAP EBP applications; IBM WebSphere Application vendors on our system,
Server, IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite, IBM Lotus Domino, IBM Lotus Notes, IBM which has contributed to our
DB2 Universal Database software; IBM ^ iSeries hardware; implementation per- cost savings. We now order
formed by IBM Business Consulting Services almost all office supplies
Key Benefits electronically without ever
Improved visibility of data across global operations; faster, more accurate, more consis- needing to raise a purchase
tent reporting; greater internal efficiency; better response to customer needs; reduced order, and the system
procurement costs handles repeat purchasing
automatically.”
— Ann Nettesheim, business intelligence manager,
Brady Corporation


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BRADY CORPORATION (continued)
Brady Corporation has increased internal efficiency and improved the speed and quality of deci-
sion making with a comprehensive SAP and IBM solution. Based around SAP R/3, the company’s
new e-business platform also incorporates transactional Web sites powered by IBM WebSphere
Commerce Suite software, and internal information portals running on IBM Lotus Domino® soft-
ware. The SAP system has provided a massive improvement in the visibility of key performance
data and delivered much-needed commonality across Brady’s global operations.

Identifying the challenge
Based in Wisconsin, in the United States, Brady Corporation manufactures and markets a broad
range of identification solutions, from high-performance labels and signs to label-application
and data-collection systems. With about 50,000 products sold in more than 100 countries,
and a global workforce of 3,000, Brady is a world leader in its market. Clients range from small
manufacturing firms to global high-tech clients such as Nokia and Motorola, and nearly half of all
Brady’s revenues come from outside the U.S., underlining its commitment to a global business
model. The company sells through several channels and places particular significance on indi-
rect distribution partners: it runs a worldwide network of 3,500 distributors and resellers.

Following internal growth and a number of acquisitions, Brady had accumulated 18 separate enter-
prise resource planning (ERP) systems across its global operations by the end of the 1990s. This
fragmentation of IT went hand in hand with a lack of operational cohesion, and it was becoming
clear that the impeded flow of information was an obstacle to more efficient business practices.


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Brady set out to overhaul its global systems and processes, acknowledging that the ability to
plan, deploy and execute strategy on a global basis was the key to maintaining growth and
market leadership. By replacing its fragmented systems with a common e-business platform
linking all parts of the enterprise, both internally and externally, Brady aimed to increase effi-
ciency and collaboration, and improve customer service. Brady selected SAP R/3 as its core ERP
system, because of the vendor’s leadership and long experience in the market. IBM Business
Consulting Services assisted with the initial implementation and provided training to ensure that
Brady could run the platform without relying on external consultants.

Global coverage
Brady’s SAP system now covers 65 percent of all operations, and the company is continuing
to roll the software out to new territories and business streams. The ultimate goal is not 100
percent coverage — some Brady offices are too small to sustain their own instances — but com-
monality across most operations is already delivering significant improvements in the visibility
of data and the speed of internal information transfer. Prior to the implementation of SAP, the
disjointed nature of information systems was a major drain on operational efficiency, and slowed
down or prevented the delivery of key performance indicators to decision makers. With its fully
integrated SAP R/3 system, Brady enjoys faster access to data, and has a common standard for
communication between different business streams. Says Ann Nettesheim, business intelligence
manager, “Visibility is a huge plus. Previously, it might take anywhere from a week to a month to


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get a breakdown of sales figures for a particular product range across a particular region. Even
then, differences in part-numbering and customer-numbering schemes meant that you couldn’t
be sure you had got back the information you requested. Reporting with mySAP Business Intel-
ligence is much easier: simply phenomenal compared to what we had before!”

In addition, the new SAP system provides far more detail and speed in Brady’s view of its global
customers. Previously, it was difficult and time-consuming to summarize sales or profitability
for global customers, because the relevant data was held in different formats in incompatible
databases. The only commonality was at a very high level, so it was difficult for global account
managers to make accurate or timely decisions. Now, decision makers can act more quickly and
on the basis of more accurate information. With improved and accelerated information on sales
and marketing, Brady also has a better understanding of its customers’ current and past pur-
chasing behavior, enabling it to meet their needs more precisely and at lower cost.

MySAP SRM for procurement cost savings
Using SAP Enterprise Buyer Professional (SAP EBP), a component of the mySAP Supplier Rela-
tionship Management (SRM) solution, Brady has transformed its procurement processes, saving
money and freeing up employees to work on higher value-added projects. Its procurement portal
enables office supplies and other nonmanufacturing supplies to be sourced directly from preap-
proved vendors, at specially negotiated prices. The solution’s use of evaluated receipt settlement
(where no invoice is created, and payment is made following receipt of the product) makes the
process faster and produces important administrative cost savings. Says Ann Nettesheim, “As


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part of the SAP EBP project, we were able to consolidate the number of vendors on our system,
which has contributed to our cost savings. We now order almost all office supplies electroni-
cally without ever needing to raise a purchase order, and the system handles repeat purchasing
automatically.” The move to electronic procurement is part of a wider strategy, which also aims to
switch all inbound ordering to electronic data interchange (EDI) or the Web.

MySAP Business Intelligence
A key component of Brady’s SAP solutions is mySAP Business Intelligence (mySAP BI), which
enables decision makers to access fast and accurate reports on a number of aspects of perfor-
mance. SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) gives users more reporting flexibility
and power than they previously had, and reduces the strain on the main SAP R/3 systems. Some
transactional reporting is still carried out in the SAP R/3 environment, but management reporting
and summaries are handled exclusively in SAP BW. Brady’s BW has recently been expanded to
include more sales and marketing data, such as operational data at the level of order details and
customer contact details. This has resulted in improved understanding of customer behavior and
greater efficiency and ease in direct marketing campaigns.

Sharing the benefits of information
As part of its initiative to improve cohesion across the enterprise, Brady aims to maximize the
utility of its SAP systems by deploying the information they contain both internally and externally.
Knowledge is always an important currency in business, and Brady has invested heavily in
ensuring its efficient transfer between employees and across departments and business


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streams. Using a number of employee portals built with Lotus Domino software, the company
has enabled increased collaboration between team members, driven up efficiency and freed
up valuable employee time by automating administrative procedures. Externally, Brady is using
IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite software to power a number of customer- and supplier-facing
e-business portals. The company’s development strategy aims at easily replicated solutions,
adapting existing Web offerings to new business streams and geographies in order to acceler-
ate deployment and minimize development and support costs. Taking a modular approach with
a single technological skill set (IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite software) brings economies of
scale and reduces training costs. Brady’s distributor extranet provides registered users with 24-
hour access to product pricing, availability data, order status and open invoice listings, and also
enables them to place orders online. The solution has a front end built on WebSphere Commerce
Suite software, and is seamlessly integrated with SAP R/3 at the back end. A similar customer-
facing Web site is also directly linked into back-end systems, ensuring seamless e-business and
fast, accurate fulfillment.

Decoding the benefits
Brady wanted to upgrade from version 2.0B of SAP Business Information Warehouse to 3.0B, in
order to take advantage of new functionality, particularly generic delta capabilities. The company
also wanted to remain on its existing IBM AS/400 ® (now IBM System i™) platform, but the new
release of SAP BW required double-byte (ASCII) coding, rather than the single-byte (EBCDIC)


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coding standard on the IBM AS/400 system. “To avoid moving off the IBM AS/400 system, which
has always proved highly reliable and robust, we carried out a code-page conversion. We viewed
it as a relatively low-risk task, certainly when compared to the alternative, which was to move
away from our server platform of choice,” comments Craig Welch, SAP Basis manager at Brady.

With advice from SAP, Brady carried out an in-place conversion, rather than exporting and reim-
porting the whole system. The whole upgrade project, including the conversion, took just six weeks
from development to production, and carrying it out in place kept the risk to a minimum. Says Craig
Welch, “I wouldn’t consider the code page conversion to be a particularly difficult task — it would
have been far more complex and costly to move away from our System i infrastructure. We were
initially surprised when we realized we would have to move to ASCII to take advantage of the new
release of BW, but the conversion went very smoothly and presented no major problems.” Now that
the conversion is complete, Brady benefits from the latest SAP BW features without sacrificing the
reliability and scalability it has come to expect from its System i servers.

for more information
Learn more about WebSphere software at:

ibm.com/websphere

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BROWARD COUNTY SCHOOLS
North America: Education

Broward County Schools and the transformational power of IBM On Demand
Workplace for Education.

Challenge
Transform an IT environment that inhibited information access and stakeholder productivity —
hindering student achievement and compliance with mandates such as the No Child Left “The IBM On Demand
Behind Act Workplace for Education
suite enables SBBC to
Why IBM?
achieve improved decision
IBM offers a cost-effective and powerful platform designed to provide students, parents,
making at reduced cost and
educators and administrators with integrated, role-based access to educational resources,
applications and collaborative tools
with greater responsiveness
to meet the on demand
Solution challenges faced by K–12
Team with IBM Global Services and IBM Software Group to create role-based portals
schools today.”
for on demand information access and collaboration among teachers, parents, students,
— Vijay Sonty, chief information officer, School Board of
administrators, suppliers and partners Broward County

Key Benefits
• Integrates people, processes and information
• Can help improve decision making
• Can help increase efficiency and effectiveness in school operations —
enhances flexibility for all stakeholders


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BROWARD COUNTY SCHOOLS (continued)
Rarely do grand and elegant visions turn out to be eminently practical. That is precisely the case, Key components
however, with Project Knexus,* the internal code name the School Board of Broward County Software
(SBBC) has given to its implementation of the IBM On Demand Workplace for Education suite. • IBM WebSphere Portal
Project Knexus aims to transform education in Broward County by providing integrated, role- Extend software

based access to district information, educational resources, applications and collaborative tools • IBM WebSphere Application
Server software
for all stakeholders. No small achievement given that, as the nation’s sixth largest school district,
• IBM Workplace
SBBC has an IT environment similar to those found in Fortune 500 companies — large, complex, Collaboration Services
distributed and populated with many applications that are difficult to integrate. software
• IBM Workplace Managed
The first phase of the four-part project has passed the pilot stage and is scheduled for deploy- Client software
ment in March 2006, when it is projected that 2,000 administrators, principals and guidance • IBM Tivoli Access Manager
software
counselors will gain portal-based access to all the resources they need to do their jobs — particu-
• IBM Tivoli Identity Manager
larly the educational performance monitoring mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. The IBM software
On Demand Workplace suite ties data together into a single central repository for seamless review • IBM Tivoli Directory
and reporting. This shared access point provides educators access to the information and collab- Integrator software
orative tools necessary to make faster, more informed decisions about teaching and learning. • IBM WebSphere Information
Integrator OmniFind™
Edition software
• IBM WebSphere Portlet
Factory software

Server
• IBM ^ pSeries

Services
• IBM Business Consulting
Services

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Projected to be fully phased in over the next four years, Project Knexus is designed to support
400,000 users, putting SBBC at the forefront of IT innovation in public schools and helping it
transform education one student at a time. “If you step back, Project Knexus should give users
everything they need in a timely and efficient manner,” says Vijay Sonty, chief information officer
at SBBC and the intellectual force behind the initiative. “All users need is a device and a browser
to gain integrated, convenient access on demand — anytime, anywhere, via any device and per-
sonalized for their roles. Information is placed at the fingertips of all education stakeholders.”

Sonty believes Project Knexus will facilitate innovative working and more support for each student,
preparing them for future success. As a bonus, by standardizing on IBM, SBBC gains a unified
architecture and deployment model to help realize bottom-line benefits in reliability, security, scal-
ability and management.

Succeeding in a challenging environment
The School Board of Broward County has 231 K–12 schools, 274,000 students and 19,000
teachers. With more than 300 applications running on more than 600 servers and 110,000 client
devices, SBBC doesn’t lack IT challenges. Those most pressing include improving the timeliness
and accuracy of information delivery and enhancing the ineffective processes — such as redun-
dant data entry and multiple sign-ons for applications — typical of fragmented environments.


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Adding to the difficulty are mandates for aligning educational technology with the direction
set by the state and federal government, such as e-learning and the No Child Left Behind
Act, a mandate calling for educational performance monitoring and accountability that
depends on easy access to information from a variety of isolated data stores.

Such data silos can give rise to redundancies, inefficiencies and financial restraints, all
of which constrain student achievement. And there is little aggregation of student data, “All users need is a device
making information redundant and difficult to share. This isolation prevents educators from and a browser to gain
seeing the big picture, thwarting the kind of assessments and accountability mandated by integrated, convenient
the No Child Left Behind Act.
access on demand —
“The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is for all students to meet appropriate grade-level anytime, anywhere, on any
performance standards. To accomplish that, you need to create benchmarks depending device and personalized for
on where you are as a school district, and the same needs to be done for each student, their roles. Information is
teacher and school,” Sonty says. “We have a data warehouse with all historical and trend- placed at the fingertips of all
ing data and a student information system with transactional data, but without integration,
education stakeholders.”
accessing the needed information is tedious at best.”
— Vijay Sonty, chief information officer, School Board of
Broward County
Such challenges led SBBC to begin formulating the solution that would eventually take
shape as Project Knexus.


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Choosing the IBM On Demand Workplace suite
In November of 2004, SBBC began laying out a series of solution requirements:

• Multiple levels of integration for easy information access
• Anytime, anywhere access via any device
• Varied resources for online collaboration
• Customized interfaces for different roles and stakeholders
• Support for open standards and interoperability
• Infrastructure reliability, availability, scalability and security
• Heterogeneous application integration support
• Easier and more cost-effective centralized management
• Ease of integration with various SAP applications

SBBC considered a number of approaches, ultimately choosing the IBM On Demand Workplace
for Education suite running on IBM ^ pSeries® servers. IBM was chosen because its On
Demand Business strategy best aligns with SBBC’s need for integration of people, business pro-
cesses, applications and data in a network-centric, manageable environment. The expertise and
support provided by IBM Business Consulting Services and IBM Business Partners also factored
into the decision.

“We looked at Vignette, BEA WebLogic, SAP Enterprise Portal 6 and Microsoft SharePoint Portal
Server software, but for scaling up to more than 400,000 users, we needed a robust platform,”
Sonty says. “That’s why we’re betting on IBM as our comprehensive source for infrastructure,
applications and services.”


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Implementing the vision
The deployment of Project Knexus to all stakeholders is planned to occur in four phases, spaced
roughly one year apart.

• Phase 1 is the administrative portal. With the pilot project already a success, SBBC is scaling
Project Knexus up to support all administrators.
• Phase 2 will tie in teacher, student and parent components.
• Phase 3 will add an SAP enterprise resource planning environment for business and opera-
tional applications.
• Phase 4 will open Project Knexus to external business partners and the community at large,
where the One Broward program is planned to offer wireless broadband access at no charge.

In imagining the future of Project Knexus, Sonty envisions a time when the whole community will
benefit. “We want to tie libraries, hospitals and other public entities together so members of our
community can leverage the Project Knexus infrastructure to accomplish their daily tasks.”

finding the solution with Project Knexus
When complete, Project Knexus is planned to provide all classes of users with integrated work
environments that contain role-specific applications, tools and services. Single-sign-on functionality
will help provide simple, secure access. Available services including document and content
management, Web content publishing, search capabilities, e-mail and fax functionality and a rich
array of other tools will help enable collaboration, partnering and learning over the Web.


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“In the educational environment, you have many types of collaborations, such as parent/teacher,
student/teacher and school administration/community interactions,” Sonty says. “IBM On Demand
Workplace for Education suite will provide tools like presence awareness and instant messaging,
Web conferencing, e-learning for students and work environments for team projects, as well as
two-way interactions using IP components of the IT infrastructure. This is exciting because we are
intensifying the focus around each student, which should boost student achievement.”

The On Demand Workplace for Education suite is also planned to offer integrated access to the
Broward County School District’s legacy applications and third-party reporting tools for fast and
easy data retrieval and reporting.

Designed to provide teacher access to the student information system, the virtual classroom and
applications for reading, attendance and reporting as well as a range of collaborative services,
Project Knexus is also planned to provide tools for creating and sharing content, curricula and
lesson plans.

The student view is designed to present a 24x7 digital learning environment. Using a laptop
and a wireless connection, students should be able to access personalized content, schedules,
assignments, textbooks and just-in-time multimedia learning exercises.


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SBBC plans to give parents access to school assignments, their child’s calendar, upcoming
school events, child attendance, teacher credentials and information on the child’s performance
as well as access to the same resources as students.

Project Knexus is designed to give administrators access to core services that support SBBC
operations, such as help desk, logistics, purchasing, maintenance, facilities, transportation and
financial applications. On the curriculum side, the portal should help teachers and administra-
tors align lesson plans with government standards and assess educational progress, as required
by the No Child Left Behind Act. Project Knexus is also designed to provide administrators with
access to valuable educational intelligence, helping them discover relationships that remain
hidden when data resides in legacy silos.

“Our data warehouse tracks student information from kindergarten through 12th grade —
proficiencies, test scores, grades and more. With integration, we can tie that to business data
from the SAP environment,” Sonty says. “This enables what-if analysis, such as finding out if
timely equipment and facility repairs impact student performance.”

Seeing positive user feedback
SBBC executives are pleased with the results of the administrative pilot, which has proved the
portal’s viability and ease of implementation.

“Guidance counselors and principals told us that with Project Knexus, data retrieval and compil-
ing that might have taken a week in the past can be performed in minutes, because everything
is in one place,” Sonty says. The pilot successfully integrated applications vital to administrators,


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guidance counselors and principals, such as Virtual Counselor, a Web-based tool providing stu-
dent information. Also integrated was the student information system, a green-screen application
made user-friendly via IBM middleware. Principals and administrators now have real-time access
to maintenance details such as open work orders and the value of repairs; previously they had to
visit separate Web sites or make several calls to get the same information.

The pilot project helped prove the advantages of IBM open-standards-based technology.
“System interoperability and openness are critical to us, because they bring our disparate
systems together,” says Sonty. “We are moving to open standards such as the Linux® operating
system, networks using TCP/IP, HTML publishing, programming that is compliant with Java 2
Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology and open integration via service-oriented archi-
tecture. IBM supports all these efforts.” In many cases, IBM On Demand Workplace support
for service-oriented architectures will speed processes through cross-departmental application
integration — such as when purchasing-application components link with financial components
to streamline procurement.

IT executives also like the simplified management of a user environment distributed throughout
the large district. IBM® Workplace Managed Client™ software provides users with a rich client
experience and helps enable centralized, server-managed control of the entire user environ-
ment. Automated deployment, management and upgrades of user desktops, to help keep all
users current with the latest software releases and new applications, help improve student secu-
rity and help reduce the IT staff workload, maximizing return on investment.


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Witnessing an exciting evolution
Project Knexus is an exciting, pioneering step in the application of the IBM On Demand Workplace
for Education suite. It offers students and their support teams a varied palette of digital content,
collaborative tools and resources for 24x7 learning — and experience with a skill set that is critical
to success in the 21st century. Says Sonty, “The IBM On Demand Workplace for Education suite
enables SBBC to achieve improved decision making at reduced cost and with greater respon-
siveness to meet the on demand challenges faced by K–12 schools today.”

for more information
For more information on IBM On Demand Workplace offerings, please contact your IBM sales
representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:

ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offerfamily/igs/a1001733

* KNEXUS is a recognized acronym for Knowledge: Networks, Exchange and Uses, and its usage herein is not intended to state or imply
affiliation with any company or trademark.

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DAIMLERCHRYSLER
Europe and North America: Automotive

A company steeped in tradition.

Challenge
Create a highly efficient portal infrastructure

Solution “We assume there is a huge
Make components available via Web services potential for this technology
Key Benefits
to help us automate manual
Widening the B2B scope through Web services
processes and better
integrate with our partners at
justifiable costs.”
— Hans-Juergen Gross, manager of IT methods
and technology, DaimlerChrysler


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DAIMLERCHRYSLER (continued)
In 1998, two companies steeped in tradition — Daimler-Benz AG and Chrysler Corporation —
merged to form DaimlerChrysler. The company is one of the world’s leading automotive, trans-
portation and services companies. Its passenger car brands include Maybach, Mercedes-Benz,
Chrysler, Jeep®, Dodge and Smart. Commercial vehicles are produced under the Mercedes-
Benz, Freightliner, Sterling, Western Star, Setra, Thomas Built Buses, Orion and American
LaFrance brands. In addition to their automotive sales, they offer financial and other services
through DaimlerChrysler Services.

With 372,500 employees and 55 major operational plants around the globe (22 in Europe, 25 in
North America, 5 in South America and 3 in both Africa and Asia), DaimlerChrysler achieved rev-
enues of US$136.1 billion (e152.9 billion) in 2001 through the sales of its products and services
in more than 200 countries. DaimlerChrysler today has a global workforce, a global shareholder
base, global brand awareness and a global outlook. Its strategy, which has positioned the com-
pany well in today’s worldwide economy, relies on four pillars: global presence, strong brands,
broad product range and technology leadership.

A highly efficient portal infrastructure
DaimlerChrysler has engaged in a series of portal projects over the last couple of years in order
to provide structured access to the huge amount of data and applications available to customers,
partners and employees. One of the most successful usage scenarios has developed around the
Supplier Portal, serving more than 15,000 individuals from around 7,000 partner corporations.


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Together with many other portals, the DaimlerChrysler Supplier Portal is an infrastructure
that makes applications from several DaimlerChrysler business units available to users over
the Internet. The portals provide a consistent interface for applications and a unified mecha-
nism to provide authorized access.

The implementation is based on IBM’s proven WebSphere Portal V4.1 software, which pro-
vides key advantages, like single sign-on for supplier users, secure transmission, one-face
appearance to the customer and standardized user management processes.

The applications, which are accessed in a very consistent manner through the portal, are of
course based on a wide range of different technologies, like IBM Lotus Notes, IBM WebSphere
or SAP software. All of the applications require an interface to key components of the portal
infrastructure, like the B2B Info Service.

The B2B Info Service is a function within the DaimlerChrysler Supplier Portals that provides
nondirect access to the (lightweight directory access protocol [LDAP] based) user directory
to enquire about user specific data. Continuous development and new requirements made it
necessary to adapt the current implementation.


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The new version must be a component that can be easily accessed by multiple, different
requestor applications and meet criteria such as the following:

• Performance
• Caching
• Neutral interface to provide access from multiple sources
• Access to one or more (multiple) directories
• Adherence to the authorization and authentication scheme that governs user enquiries

Making components available via Web services
The original interface for the B2B User Service had been built around an in-house developed
protocol based on XML over HTTP and implemented as a Web application with servlet technol-
ogy. To meet the new requirements, the new interface protocol was chosen to be Web services
enabled in order to provide the flexibility and interoperability needed.

“We wanted to provide a component that could be efficiently accessed from inside and maybe
later on potentially outside our firewall and support a standardized interface available on basi-
cally all application platforms. Web services technology fits these criteria exactly!” says Mr.
Hans-Juergen Gross, manager of IT methods and technology at DaimlerChrysler, Sindelfingen,
in justification of the technology decision.


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The Web service developed in this project will be used by all applications integrated in the
DaimlerChrysler Supplier Portal and, perhaps in the future, in other portals too. There are a
substantial number of these applications, all potentially using this service. At this stage the
Web services are only accessible within the DaimlerChrysler intranet.

“IBM has done a lot of research in the area of Web services and successfully completed several
projects utilizing this technology. We hence decided to team with IBM to benefit from their experi-
ence,” explains Mr. Hans-Juergen Gross.

The project was developed in a collaboration between the local DaimlerChrysler team in Stuttgart,
DCCG (DaimlerChrysler Consulting Graz) in Austria and the IBM consultants, with the goal to
mentor the DaimlerChrysler team on Web services technology.

“Through hands-on, onsite training, our engineers were guided by IBM consultants. We quickly
achieved substantial results,” states Mr. Martin Koelbel, lead developer at DaimlerChrysler,
describing the excellent relationship with the IBM team.

The development was done with AXIS tools and IBM WebSphere Application Developer software
for both the Web services provider and the requestor. While the development environment was
based under Microsoft Windows® 2000, the production environment will be under WebSphere V5
software running under UNIX® technology.


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Client proxy generation with a few mouse clicks
By using Web services, it turned out to be quite easy to create lightweight interfaces. For a com-
pany with heterogeneous systems, it is important to use a technology that can be accessed from
different platforms in a consistent and robust manner and that is easy to handle at the same time.

The advantages for the client, that is, the Web service requestor, are equally attractive. Given the
fact that tools are available today on multiple platforms, the messaging and transportation layer
of the client invocation can be generated virtually by a click of a button. This can be a huge time
saver for the DaimlerChrysler developers.

In several aspects, this project was seen as a pathfinder project on Web services technology.
Given the positive experience, the technology could be applied within B2B applications as a
next step. Most of the current B2B Web applications merely provide a GUI for users. However,
by simply adding a Web services interface, these applications could be expanded to directly
integrate with the back-end systems of the suppliers and vice versa.


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“We assume there is a huge potential for this technology to help us automate manual processes
and better integrate with our partners at justifiable costs,” says Hans-Juergen Gross, describing
further plans at DaimlerChrysler.

For additional information on DaimlerChrysler Corporation AG, please visit:

dcx.com

Story URL:

ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/khal-62gn35

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DISCOvERY COMMUNICATIONS
North America: Media and entertainment

Discovery Communications unifies working environment with IBM portal and
enterprise document management solution.

Challenge
Manually managing copious production documents for every TV program, plus the
documents that spell out legal rights of ownership, was not the most efficient method for “Lotus Domino Document
creating, reviewing, approving, versioning and accessing these critical documents Manager software has
proved to be the ideal
Why IBM?
enterprise document
IBM Business Partner considered IBM Lotus Domino Document Manager software the
management solution,
most flexible document management system on the market; Discovery believed in IBM’s
vision and commitment to portal development; superior architecture of IBM WebSphere
because it features a very
Portal software facilitates seamless integration with a wide range of existing applications, straightforward interface
maximizing return on past investments that we can access through
integration. And WebSphere
Portal software enables us to
extract more value from the
investment we already have
in Lotus Domino Document
Manager software.”
— Craig Brown, vice president of corporate systems
development, Discovery Communications, Inc.


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DISCOvERY COMMUNICATIONS (continued)
Solution
New document management solution integrated with portal delivers single-sign-on access
to company’s disparate sources of critical production and legal information and media
content, as well as providing document life-cycle management for creating, reviewing and
approving these documents; thanks to an IBM document management and portal solu-
tion, Discovery Communications is finding it easier to track the numerous documents that
accompany the production of a TV program
“We saw WebSphere
Key Benefits Portal software as being
• Document-retrieval processes that used to take weeks now takes seconds
exceptionally flexible in terms
• Preserving and making accessible the company’s content assets has made it simple for
of the developer’s freedom to
employees to obtain the latest version of every document
integrate other applications
• Library researchers can now focus on high value strategic research projects and queries
into it and build upon it.”
— Craig Brown


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For hundreds of millions of television viewers worldwide, Discovery Communications, Inc. (DCI) Key components
is the leading global real-world media and entertainment company. DCI is the parent company
Software
of Discovery Channel and scores of other network brands in 160 countries and 35 languages, as • IBM WebSphere Portal
well as educational franchises and retail stores. With a flair for presenting the unusual, the com- Extend
pany has been combining education and entertainment since 1985. • IBM Lotus Domino
Document Manager
Within its far-flung broadcasting empire, however, DCI had to work hard to distribute the
Business Partners
mission-critical material and tools that its 5,000-person global workforce needed to do their
• Carefree Technologies
jobs. In particular, managing production life cycles and the documents that spell out legal rights
• Cobra Technologies
of ownership — DCI’s lifeblood — was a labor-intensive manual process. Documents were stored
in disparate islands of information rather than centrally, which added time to searches for these
essential production documents.

DCI accumulates, on average, a six-inch stack of production documents for every program it
develops, and the process of creating and accessing these documents was cumbersome and
tedious. The problem also consumed the time of in-house library researchers who ultimately
received requests to find the appropriate document. “We had to increase access and simplify
searches for the information residing in our production documents,” says Craig Brown, vice
president of corporate systems development at DCI. “The solution would have to begin with the
workflow for creating and approving the documents, so that employees could rest assured that
they were dealing with the latest document.”


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Discovery turned to IBM Business Partner Carefree Technologies (Carefree) for a document
management solution that would centralize and streamline the process of document creation,
filing, management and retrieval. Carefree, in turn, recommended IBM Lotus Domino Document
Manager software to alleviate Discovery’s document management headaches. “Lotus Domino
Document Manager software is the most flexible document management product on the market
because of its open application programming interface (API), and because it was designed for
the Internet,” says Bill Plunkett, vice president of sales and marketing, Carefree.

Tuning in to higher productivity
To make it more efficient to provide employees with the data and applications they needed
to function in the worldwide Discovery workplace, the company’s Technology and Media
Services Group began evaluating portal solutions that would aggregate and personalize
information, and make it accessible from a single Web site. No stranger to IBM, DCI had
implemented IBM WebSphere Commerce software to power its highly successful Web store
at www.discoverystore.com. The company evaluated IBM’s portal offering, IBM WebSphere
Portal software, and compared it with the portal product of another leading vendor.


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The winning contender was IBM WebSphere Portal Extend software, primarily because of its
superior architecture, according to Brown. “We saw WebSphere Portal software as being excep-
tionally flexible in terms of the developer’s freedom to integrate other applications into it and build
upon it,” says Brown. “In addition, IBM has demonstrated the vision — the long-term commitment
to portal development using both the Lotus and WebSphere product sets. This reassured us that
the product would be available for the long term and allowed us to take advantage of our in-
house IT skill sets.”

DCI has been implementing the new portal in stages. Only six months into the project, the portal
began to act as the central gateway to news, information and tools. Employees are noticing the
difference in their efficiency and productivity. “The WebSphere Portal and Lotus Domino Document
Manager solutions are proving to be a consolidating force within our organization, helping
employees to make better decisions, faster,” says Brown.

Greg Fioravanti, vice president, business affairs buy-in, notes, “Lotus Domino Document Manager
software turned out to be a perfect solution for our document storage challenges. It was extremely
flexible to configure to our existing workflow, integrated well with our other systems, and now
makes critical documents available globally to each user on his or her desktop. This solution has
made a significant contribution to increasing DCI’s productivity.”


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Client successes with collaborative solutions from IBM. How IBM® Workplace™ and Lotus software transforms business for SAP customersfor SAP customers

Client successes with collaborative solutions from IBM. How IBM® Workplace™ and Lotus software transforms business for SAP customersfor SAP customers

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