By Beth Schultz
IntraNet, 1/20/97

You'd think a company with an advertising campaign featuring leotard-clad men wearing big fruit costumes and pitching comfy underwear might encourage a little fun at work.

But, until recently, Fruit of the Loom, Inc. executives ran a strict, no-nonsense operation. The corporate culture, in fact, was on the stuffy side.

Employees - blue- and white-collar alike - put in 42 hours a week, mostly from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day. They get their checks on Mondays, a decision dating to the '30s when executives worried that if employees got paid on Fridays they'd blow their earnings over the weekend at local taverns.

Culturally, it seems, the company has just stepped into the 1990s. Forget the fact that Fruit of the Loom has its thriving Activewear line - until last summer, male employees who worked at headquarters had to wear ties every day.

From a networking perspective, Fruit of the Loom was behind the times, too. MIS ran a small, basic Novell, Inc. NetWare LAN, primarily for file and print services. Different buildings at the headquarters complex in Bowling Green, Ky., weren't even networked, says Paul Hart, a software research analyst for the company.

Financial data was stored on a big Amdahl Corp. mainframe, and the company's production data - all 3.8 terabytes of it - was housed in a series of IBM Application System/400 databases at plants and distribution centers worldwide. Some of these facilities had dial-up connections or 64K bit/sec dedicated links to the headquarters, but not many. Employees who needed access to either the financial or production data typically had a dumb terminal or perhaps a PC with an AS/400 connectivity package sitting on their desks, says Vern Germano, a senior systems analyst at Fruit of the Loom. 'Users could get to the information, but they had to jump a lot of hurdles,' he adds.

IP, the cornerstone of an intranet, didn't really have a place in this type of environment. IBM's SNA and Novell's IPX protocols did the job of directing data between systems.

Welcome to the '90s

Jeff Hunt, a senior operations analyst who started working at Fruit of the Loom last March on a consultancy basis, says he was told upon his hiring: 'We're operating in a 1960's mode, and we need to move to the year 2000 in a year and a half.'

Even though the company did not have an existing TCP/IP-based infrastructure, it didn't take MIS much to figure out it should take advantage of Internet technology internally, says Glenn Banfield, director of electronic commerce systems development. In fact, the department already had acquired the tools - Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator browser and SuiteSpot servers - for an Internet project.

'Our CIO gave us a directive to integrate and enable access to the information systems we had in place,' Banfield says. 'We did not set out to create something new. We were guided by the principles of revenue generation, improved customer satisfaction, reduction in cycle time and cost reduction,' he says.

What quickly evolved was a corporatewide Web named UnderNet.

UnderNet is still largely the domain of MIS, but the development team

is fervently promoting its use throughout the corporation. 'We'd like to see UnderNet better profile the enterprise,' says Gretchen Gottlich, senior information technology analyst and Web team leader at Fruit of the Loom.

In other words, the Web team would like more departmental involvement in UnderNet. Some departments have presences on the intranet, but for the most part they are not deep. Oftentimes, they're simply there to say, 'Here we are.'

But the operations department is already putting the intranet to good use. Customer service representatives can use browsers to find out which Fruit of the Loom products are in stock. For example, agents can search for availability of red sweatshirts at stores within a particular city.

Department representatives interested in UnderNet work with the Web- master, Brian Ochs, to develop content. He has set up an intranet coordinator system, through which one person from each business group handles the content on that group's piece of the Web.

'Brian makes the availability happen, but you have to maintain it,' Gottlich says.

By this March, when the Web team will host an intranet fair to push UnderNet, the goals are to have signi-ficantly more content online and to make sure that all home page icons burrow down at least four levels, Gottlich says. It wants to move beyond the 'here we are' stage.

Make way

Gottlich started working at Fruit of the Loom on July 8. Within a week, she had procured a news server for the intranet.

By month's end, she had finagled a purchase order for a Pentium Pro server that would be used exclusively for the intranet. By Aug. 1, a directory server was running on the intranet, and the first newsgroup went up shortly thereafter.

'When I was hired, I interpreted the situation as: 'We've got a tremendous amount of intellectual strength and some hardware, now go make the magic happen,'' says Gottlich, who led the intranet development at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

What she didn't realize, Gottlich says, is that the cash wouldn't be readily forthcoming. While Fruit of the Loom is committed to opening its information to employees, it hasn't devoted any money to the intranet project. In fact, the only resource Gottlich's been able to get exclusively for UnderNet is the one Pentium Pro server. 'We've basically begged, borrowed or stolen every server we have, except that one,' Gottlich says.

MIS has about a $23 million budget, but much of that money is going into infrastructure upgrades - new wiring, an Ethernet LAN and a frame relay network that links the 50 or so distribution centers and plants. The lack of specific funding is more of an annoyance than a setback. The Web team has been able to piggyback the technology it has needed on existing deployments or get to it through requisitions for other projects. When the team needed another Web server, for example, it turned one of its many AS/400s into one.

The Web team got lucky with its mail servers. A year ago, E-mail primarily existed in the form of a mainframe package from Fischer International, Inc. called Totally Automated Office (TAO). Upper management dictated that MIS get rid of TAO within a year, Hart says.

With that edict, MIS had the go-ahead to begin using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol-based mail. Early users got Eurdora, but now Netscape Mail is the standard, along with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 95 or 3.1 for Workgroups operating systems and NetManage, Inc.'s Swift IP stack, analyst Hart says.

Since it has started the corporate migration to intranet-based mail, MIS has had to update its mail server four times. As of mid-December, the company had about 900 SMTP mail addresses, says Tammy Kirby, E-mail administrator at Fruit of the Loom.

'E-mail has been one of the biggest factors in acceptance of the intranet,' Hart says.

E-mail novices can turn to UnderNet for help in setting up and administering their accounts. The communication support group within MIS maintains a number of pages, including some on Netscape mail setup, that walk users through procedures.

Once they've got E-mail figured out, employees can use UnderNet to find each other. All they have to do is click on the Directory Services icon from the home page, and search by name or department.

The group has even developed directory pages for those employees with pagers. From those pages, users can type in and send a pager message.

By Gottlich's estimate, 1,500 people on the Bowling Green campus have access to UnderNet. The goal is to double that figure, to roughly 3,000, or about 10% of Fruit of the Loom's 30,000-employee population. The remaining 27,000 employees worldwide work in the plants, weaving and sewing the apparel.

The team hasn't decided yet whether it will use kiosks to reach those people, but if it does, the numbers of employees with Web access will obviously increase dramatically.

Rolling out Web access to the remaining employees shouldn't be a problem. The hardest part, updating the infrastructure, is just about done. Now comes time to work on content.

'We've made this investment,' analyst Germano says, 'so now we have an opportunity as developers to put up information that will impact the company, information that people can use to make decisions.'

UnderNet unwrapped

The big apples weren't trying to call attention to themselves per se, but to the intranet they were launching that day. They showed off the intranet, called UnderNet, on kiosks set up in the lobby. It was all part of the fun the group had in laying the groundwork for the corporate Web, and part of the effort to drum up support for UnderNet.

'I knew that technically we would have no problem getting the intranet up, but to be really successful we had to reach a critical mass,' says Gretchen Gottlich, senior information technology analyst and Web team leader at Fruit of the Loom.

The event also provided a motivational force for people working on the intranet project, Gottlich says. 'The significance of Nov. 12 is that it made us meet our deadlines,' she explains.

That was no small feat, given that the Web team didn't hold its first official meeting until Sept. 9 and didn't really define its goals for the intranet until a month after that.

The UnderNet team is primarily made up of employees across the various MIS disciplines, but some other nontechnical folks got involved, too.

The UnderNet team has set March 23 as its next big target date. It plans on holding an intranet fair with about 10 booths running different services. 'We'll be doing a soft sell, giving away T-shirts to people who go to every booth,' Gottlich says.

She adds that she's not sure what's beyond that but knows she wants UnderNet to continue growing and to become more interactive. She'll undoubtedly concoct some affair to mark the end of that development phase, too.