Little guys often thrive by making up in speed and creativity what they lack in size. Following this strategy has landed Corporate Express, Inc. among big competitors, which has forced it to be quicker and more imaginative than ever.

That's why this booming office supply company has turned to electronic commerce.

The tale of Corporate Express' success reads like an American dream. Founder Jirka Rysavy started with an 11-employee, money-losing local office supply store he bought in 1987 for $100 and assumption of $15,000 in overdue accounts on about $300,000 a year in sales. He broadened the company's approach and its sales and turned it into a $1 billion multinational corporation by 1995.

Corporate Express hit $3 billion this year, largely by spending more than $200 million on acquisitions. Today the company, of Broomfield, Colo., employs 30,000 people in more than 700 locations worldwide.

The tricks the office goods supplier learned about being fast and efficient still apply, especially as Corporate Express launches an extranet-based electronic commerce system. Its aim is to peel yet another layer of purchasing bureaucracy off the already lean process that has helped fuel the firm's exponential growth.

Corporate Express' philosophy is to pare down the participants in routine business purchases, enabling lower prices for customers and less cost - and bigger profit - for itself. The method eliminates several middlemen, notably customer inventory and retail storefronts. Customers order basic office products such as pencils, paper and floppy disks, and even cleaning materials and furniture, through the Corporate Express clearinghouse, which usually provides next-day delivery.

Customers don't keep inventory because Corporate Express delivers the goods from its regional warehouses, and occasionally directly from manufacturers.

The largest customers have standing shipment schedules for common goods.

Oracle Corp., for example, receives regular deliveries of paper at its Red-wood Shores, Calif., campus.

Exploiting technology

Automating procedures to streamline and save costs has been a part of Corporate Express' approach since its inception. Using technological tools also has been an integral part of the company's approach. Customers have long been able to place orders by fax as well as phone, so an online order placement system, based on proprietary technology, was a natural step nearly two years ago. The latest version uses the World Wide Web as the internetwork and takes advantage of the proliferation of browsers to make the process quicker and more efficient.

"At the executive level, technology is one of our core competencies," says Jennifer Maher, director of new media at Corporate Express. "Without technology, we are another company with trucks and routes. The technology is more than just an enabler." Electronic commerce, Maher says, is a critical part of Corporate Express' strategy.

Internet-based commerce logically grows from Corporate Express' emphasis on computer tools. Corporate Ex-press' earliest inventory systems were home-grown automated applications designed by a computer whiz boyhood friend of the founder. Rysavy wanted to streamline inventory and boost the small profit from each office supply product he sold. With his programmer buddy Pavel Bouska, Rysavy invested most of the company's early cash flow in computer systems.

The company adopted its first PC-based computerized customer supply programs in 1989; the systems have steadily become more sophisticated ever since. The back-end infrastructure that today forms the basis of its electronic commerce application first came online in 1994 using a proprietary client interface.

Customers dialed in and placed orders, and the system immediately checked those orders against inventory. If supplies were available, the system transmitted two copies of the order: one to billing, the other to the warehouse, noting the supplies' storage site. If customers ordered something not in stock, the automated system checked Corporate Express' selection of online catalogs for the lowest price and placed the order.

"Our role is to be the supply chain manager for nonproduction goods," says Mike Jones, Corporate Express vice president of information systems and chief information officer. "We offer reliable delivery to our customers so they don't need to maintain inventory."

The company's goal is to offer just-in-time inventory control, and, in fact, Corporate Express turns around inventory 17 times a year, roughly three times the average for its industry.

Web offers new road

The company's automated process remains essentially the same today, although Corporate Express IT staff has upgraded the equipment. Cor-porate Express also supports standard electronic data interchange and maintains electronic ordering systems on PC and AS/400 systems.

In the past 18 months, the company has Webified its computer infrastructure and, in particular, has accommodated a browser interface to its customer order system. Last month, its new E-Way for the Internet went online.

The corporate commitment is significant. "Three and a half years ago, we had six employees working on the IS staff," Jones says. "Now 250 people are working on strategic systems."

The biggest change was replacing a proprietary interface, written in Microsoft Corp. Visual Basic, necessary for customers to place orders online with a Web-based interface.

Customers enter the E-Way extranet through Corporate Express' Web page. Corporate Express hosts E-Way inside one layer of a firewall, on a so-called demilitarized zone within its own intranet. Data access is restricted by password, though intranet and extranet queries draw the same data.

Corporate Express also provides RSA Data Security, Inc. certification at several levels, starting with transactions between the buyer and the internal catalog system, as well as upon orders transmitted from the customer to Corporate Express and from Corporate Express to a manufacturer.

The company retains the back-end infrastructure, and Dave Leonard, chief technology architect, describes the system as a three-tiered client/server configuration. The client component is the customer's browser interface to E-Way, which presents information via standard Web pages. Corporate Express runs Netscape Communications Corp.'s Commerce Server under Windows NT.

The Web pages link to the back end, which includes the ordering system and interfaces to several Oracle databases that store inventory and account information. The Oracle databases are stored on Hewlett-Packard Co. servers running HP-UX.

The transaction processing monitor is Tuxedo middleware from BEA Systems, Inc., and IT staff does custom tuning in C and C++.

"We liked the mainframe model of a central data repository and thin client," Jones says. "Our Web model is not dissimilar."

Because Corporate Express' customers usually have Internet accounts and browsers, the companies can set up their online communications more quickly than with the proprietary system. "We used to bring up three customers a month, now we can do three a day," Leonard says.

Leonard estimates that a typical company could shave about a quarter of its supply costs by adopting a streamlined electronic buying system using E-Way.

Electronic-assisted delivery

The new configuration extends Corporate Express' trademark just-in-time service. During the pilot program, the combined technology satisfied one particularly challenging customer.

Some U.S. Navy ships come into port with only 48 hour notice, often with brief docking periods, so supply officers scramble all over town to fill the orders they have accumulated during months at sea. Two days away from docking in San Diego, a ship testing E-Way transmitted its supply orders (across a satellite-based Internet connection) to Corporate Express. The company's trucks were waiting at the dock to be unloaded when the ship arrived. The only ones unhappy were the sailors who were hoping for a longer shore leave, Leonard recalls.

Few Corporate Express customers require satellite uplinks to the Internet, but Corporate Express does try to customize E-Way for clients. For example, users can configure their access to show or hide product photos or limit the length of a product description. They can browse by product type, name or specific manufacturer.

Also, the online catalog is dotted with icons that designate particular products as recycled, sold by minority-owned businesses, or marked down in price, depending on the customer's interest.

"We wanted a very customer-centric distribution system," Jones says. E-Way can generate reports for customers in the format of their choice, such as a spreadsheet, File Transfer Protocol-accessible file, or even saved to disk and shipped instead of transmitted.

E-Way customers can build templates to customize the service for their businesses and design forms for common orders, such as trade show supplies or rush orders, Leonard says.

For example, a company may implement business rules that limit spending by particular employees or restrict the type of orders. Corporate Express staff can help them configure the system so a copy of each order goes to the user's supervisor and triggers status reports, by e-mail, fax, hard copy or other means, when the order goes through.

Corporate Express staff also will help customers build an interface to the client site's procurement system or its accounting system to process the billing.

"And everything's handled in real time," Leonard says. Shoppers can see a running tally of the cost of their orders.

Customizing the message

Corporate Express' intranet/extra-net developers also are experimenting with infomercials (Maher prefers to not call them advertisements) on various equipment-related topics, such as ergo-nomics. A supplier may pay to sponsor an online video clip, but Maher's staff ensures the file provides useful background information, not just a vendor promotion. The company is testing some of these infomercials on the intranet before they make them regular features of the extranet.

"We want the site to become a resource for our customers," Maher says.

Also, the IT staff writes database calls that trigger "reminder" ads that appear when a user orders a related product - for example, a suggestion to buy bags when a shredder goes into the virtual shopping cart.

"It's also an opportunity for vendors to promote specials," Maher says.

Corporate Express is no longer the new kid in the office supply business; the company is one of the world's largest suppliers of office products to large corporations. Its growth, while attributed in large part to a decade of acquisitions, clearly is also due to smart use of technology. Now the office supply innovator is taking advantage of the intranet infrastructure to streamline its operations further using electronic-commerce.

"When you consider the way the Internet has changed communications and interaction and the way Corporate Express has changed the office supply business, it's amazing how these two strategies are coming together," Maher says. And just in time for the not-so-little guy who's still looking for the next edge on the competition.