By Beth Schultz
IntraNet, 12/16/96

A manager at a TRW, Inc. automotive manufacturing plant has just received an unexpected order from a major supplier of car engines. The customer needs valves, and fast. But he is also exerting considerable pressure for low prices.

The plant manager knows more than just this one order hinges on his ability to meet the customer's demands.

The engine manufacturer has been shopping its business around, and TRW stands to win big.

To fill the order, the plant manager needs to requisition some parts. After getting a quote from one of his regular suppliers, he decides to run a check on companies providing goods to other portions of TRW's massive automotive business. He fires up his browser and clicks his way to the Supplier Data Warehouse, a repository of vendor and product information available on TRW's intranet.

Using a search engine, he quickly finds the names of the top 10 parts suppliers with whom TRW does business. The manager decides to approach one of the suppliers.

The manager has no prior relationship with the supplier, but, leveraging the business other TRW groups do with the company, he negotiates a great deal. In turn, he's able to give his customer a good price on the valves.

The engine manufacturer knows the valves are top of the line and is impressed with the pricing. The company decides to negotiate a long-term contract with TRW.

A new order

TRW's intranet team considers the Supplier Data Warehouse one of the more mission-critical applications on the corporate Web. 'We're under considerable price pressure and we have to be able to do everything we can to reduce costs. This helps,' explains Neil Fox, intranet developer and manager of advanced development and applied technology at TRW.

Applications such as this are also helping convince management at TRW's automotive operations that the Web can support a real bonanza of job-related information. This has taken some convincing, given the TRW corporate network is sacrosanct.

The corporate backbone 'not only carries Web information but mission-critical data, such as production information for all TRW manufacturing units,' Fox says. 'Automotive wants to make sure we don't clog the pipe by putting up a nice video that makes one of our seat belt plants go down.'

TRW takes the automotive group's concerns seriously because it supplies 65% of TRW's revenue. The group designs, manufactures and sells steering and suspension systems, engine components, occupant restraints and electronics for cars, trucks, buses and off-highway vehicles.

Of TRW's 67,000 employees worldwide, about 45,000 workers draw their paychecks from TRW's automotive businesses.

Given the scope of these units, their buy-in is important to the intranet developers, says Priscilla Luce, the initiator of TRW's corporate Web and vice president of marketing and organizational communications for the $10 billion company, headquartered in Cleveland. Little by little, the intranet team is adding automotive content to the Web, which, until recently, has been the domain of corporate operations and the Space & Defense unit.

For example, the intranet now hosts a site dedicated to Project Earnings Leadership In Tomorrow's Environment (ELITE), a multiyear automotive program TRW initiated in 1995 with a goal of improving operations, reducing costs and speeding time to market.

Project ELITE's three-month-old Web site is pretty basic. It's simply designed to explain what the program is, describe its objectives and provide contact names, says Andrea Tekac, an organizational change communicator at TRW. Project ELITE-related publications are also available via the site.

'This site is important because when we have a major initiative, it's important for employees to know what's going on, whether they're involved or not,' Luce says. 'We can get information to a broad number of people.' Longer term, the ELITE site will be used to put up best practices devised by different automotive manufacturing groups, Tekac says. 'We want to bring people closer to the providers of information. They'll be able to look at the best practices and say, 'Oh, Joe at seat belt systems cut costs by 20% by doing X, Y and Z. Let me call him.' '

While the intranet team has made significant strides in getting managers to appreciate and use TRW Web, it's barely nudged into the consciousness of the general automotive employee population - the workers toiling on the assembly lines and factory floors.

'Our automotive production employees haven't yet shown a need for or an interest in Web access. They don't even have access to workstations,' Luce says.

The intranet task force assumes that about half of TRW's population has access to a computer, whether that machine resides on an individual's desktop or is located in a central spot. Of those 30,000 employees who have access to a computer, only about 12,000 have Web connectivity, Fox says. 'Our intention is to get access to the Web for everyone.'

The technology solution is relatively straightforward: Install kiosks and additional central computers and give everyone on the factory floor access. Content presents a much bigger challenge, Luce says.

'One of the things we need to do with production employees is put the right information in their hands. A lot of what we have on TRW Web right now is intended for managers, administrative staff and engineers. It wouldn't be of interest to production employees,' Luce says.

This is an issue with which the TRW intranet task force is only just now beginning to grapple, even though intranet activity dates to early 1994. At that time, unbeknownst to each other, several of the computer-savvy TRW operating units were beginning Web work.

Corporate moves

Response was overwhelming, with nearly 30 content providers expressing an interest in distributing their information electronically.

'One of the objectives behind harnessing the power of the Web is that we would be able to deliver to TRW employees consistent information as it was happening,' Luce says. 'There was a lot of company information that employees in the divisions and operating groups didn't have access to when they needed it - things like the annual report.'

To meet Luce's needs, Fox's information resources group built a prototype client/server application that made common data accessible via hyperlinks. No sooner had it demonstrated the prototype when it saw the Mosaic browser. ' 'Oh my god,' we said, 'the world has changed!' '

Fox's group rebuilt the prototype using Mosaic and the Web and Luce's team presented it to top executives. 'We wanted to demonstrate that we could get to TRW information and to data outside on the World-Wide Web,' Fox says.

That started the ball rolling toward TRW Web, which now comprises more than 100 Web servers. Initial content included the massive company policy book published by the law department and the corporate phone directory, Luce says.

While Luce was marshaling content providers at corporate, folks at TRW Space & Electronics Group's (S&EG) Space Park facility and at the TRW Systems Integration Group (SIG) had started working with Web technology, too. 'The whole Web idea seemed to take hold synchronously at different sites,' says C.G. Moore, an innovation consultant with SIG.

At Space Park in Redondo Beach, Calif., the Engineering Visualization Center created a site for its animation and multimedia projects and began working on other prototypes, says Raminta Jaucokas, head of the center. Meanwhile, SIG in Fairfax, Va., had a variety of pilots under way, including publication of technical system development materials, Moore says. The SIG site is probably in its fifth or sixth reincarnation now, he adds.

'We would like people to fall face forward on the keyboard and get to where they want to go. If it's not that easy, it's not of much use, so we refine the Web in that direction,' Moore says.

The SIG Software Engineering Process Group posts best practices on the Web, while the information systems group provides hundreds of training courses, for example.

These disparate efforts fit right into Luce's picture of an intranet. 'We wanted a tool that the business units themselves would own and use in the manner of the most interest to them,' she says. 'However, we do have an overriding objective, and that's that everything is connected to everything else.'

In other words, TRW didn't want the operating units to establish their own intranets. 'So if you click enough times, you can get anywhere in the company,' Luce says.

'We're dealing with technical people who have been using these tools for a while, and we don't want to diminish their enthusiasm, but these are company resources. It's within our realm of responsibilities to say: We want you to be a part of the bigger system,' Luce says.

To work through the intranet issues, TRW has established a task force that pulls from a network of internal communications professionals - the content providers - and technical experts. Luce's group in Cleveland has taken on functional responsibility for the Web.

To help employees navigate TRW Web, the intranet task force devised a three-layered structure for it, with the corporate TRW Web home page at the center, operating unit pages in the middle and department or project sites at the outer layer.

TRW S&EG, for instance, recently put up its own home page, called InfoWeb. 'Our objective was to create an umbrella page with links to other sites,' says Dan Sheehy, manager of internal communications for the group. 'This makes it easy for engineers and scientists in one division or department to find out what's going on in others,' he says.

The TRW home page, which about 30% of the company's 130 operating units worldwide use as their default home page, features a stock ticker and daily news feeds. Since many operating units use this page as their own, this really makes it the 'homeless' page, intranet team members quip.

As the operating units turn to the intranet, TRW Web is taking on a much more strategic role within the corporation, Fox says.

'We're moving from a great information publishing platform to mission-critical applications architecture,' he says.

Web Underpinnings

'In the past, the IS departments have been completely independent and left to make their own decisions and strategies. Everyone pretty much worked in a vacuum,' says Neil Fox, manager of advanced development and applied technology at TRW.

'Today, the CIO has laid out a strategy of commonality. He wants a single computer platform and common E-mail, word processing and spreadsheet programs.'

That degree of sameness isn't expected on the intranet, but coordination of Web assets is a goal, says Fox, who for the next two years will be responsible for managing TRW's intranet strategy. 'We can't control things on the Web, but we can direct them,' he says. 'It will be important for all of the IS personnel to be aware of Web activities and to work together to make sure there's nothing inappropriate going on on the intranet.'

At corporate headquarters, Fox is overseeing the migration of Web servers from a Unix platform to Windows NT. 'NT seems to provide everything we need, and it's easier to support.'

That's not necessarily the case at some operating units, such as TRW Space & Electronics Group and TRW Systems Integration Group, which is loaded with Unix gurus. It wouldn't always make sense for them to follow corporate's lead to NT, Fox says.

While the server choice remains the purview of each IS group, a central intranet task force has made some browser decisions. Web-enabled TRW employees are using either Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer or Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator. 'People should only be using the overlapping feature set of those environments for developing Web pages,' Fox says.

For now, that means developers shouldn't use ActiveX. So far, that hasn't been an issue, says Fox, adding that more of a problem stems from the differences between Microsoft's and Netscape's implementations of Java and JavaScript.

'The implementations are slightly different, so we have to tweak and modify the code accordingly,' Fox says.

Automatic HTML

'We knew we were resource-constrained, so rather than building pages, we decided to build tools,' says Neil Fox, intranet developer and manager of advanced development and applied technology at TRW in Cleveland. For content providers, for instance, Fox's group is building a tool it calls AutoHTML to make Web content creation as simple as possible. Content providers create documents in Microsoft Word, then drop them in designated folders. A public relations staffer, for example, may store a document in the news folder, Fox says.

The folder resides on a file server mounted on a Sun Microsystems, Inc. workstation, which also supports the AutoHTML program.

AutoHTML monitors the folders for new documents and, when it finds one, converts it to HTML. The tool then creates a link from the corporate home page.

After five days, the program automatically moves the document off the site and into a central repository. The document stays there for 90 days. Fox's team has developed one version of AutoHTML, but needs to rework it so it aligns with planned intranet upgrades.

For the corporate operation, Fox is upgrading from a Unix server and writing everything in Perl to a Microsoft Corp. Win-dows NT server and server-side Java.

'We're anxiously awaiting the new version of AutoHTML,' says C.G. Moore, innovation consultant and Webmaster for TRW Systems Integration Group in Fairfax, Va.