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At National Gypsum, a leading wallboard manufacturer, the corporate mission is to provide "excellence across the board."

Striving to meet this corporate standard has put Mike Brannon, senior manager of e-commerce, on top of the latest trends and technologies for extending access to the enterprise. Of late, that has meant embracing SSL VPN technology, while ousting a legacy IPSec VPN. The SSL VPN has become the basis of a secure, easy and cost-effective extended enterprise for thousands of users. Launched in 2002 with a price tag of $60,000, the SSL VPN has been expanded today to include new information delivery options, such as speech access and Web services, he says.

These latest efforts culminate more than five years of work National Gypsum has put toward extending the enterprise. In the process, the number of individuals who can tap business data and applications remotely has grown from 150 employees to more than 9,000 people including employees, retailers and shipping companies. The company is reaping the benefits. "In a highly commoditized industry, we have created strong preference for our product via improved customer service and dramatically increased customer service responsiveness and availability of delivery information," Brannon says.

National Gypsum wins our 2004 Extended Enterprise Innovator Award for visionary use of emerging connection technologies to better customer relationships.

Basic building block

National Gypsum's transformation into an extended enterprise started in 1997. That's when the company set up an advanced call center in the headquarters' city of Charlotte, N.C., and started transitioning from paper orders and invoices via fax and mail to online order entry and invoicing. Rather than dealing with a local sales office via paper, customers began conducting business with the call center's Web-based agents. National Gypsum completed the transition from the regional offices to the national call center in 2001 and now delivers 86% of invoices electronically, with a goal of soon eliminating all paper in its invoicing process, Brannon says.

In the next phase of its extended enterprise evolution, National Gypsum decided to give sales representatives remote access so they could place orders, check invoices and track shipments firsthand. This project began with a dozen representatives in Florida using well-established remote-access gear from 3Com and toll-free number dial-in.

Because of the remote access, National Gypsum no longer needed to maintain as many physical sales offices and, by this year, had shuttered 67, Brannon says. This eliminated rent, heat and electric bills and in some cases taxes by removing the company's physical presence from certain states altogether. The company's 150 sales agents became teleworkers, which in turn set off successive deployments of three different remote-access technologies as National Gypsum sought new technologies to meet their growing needs, he says.