Profit Magazine - May 2011

dation of the reports distributed through the portal. This ensures that no document is ever posted to the wrong place and that only the right people have access.

Customers also use the portal to reduce their own paper usage by giving their manufacturing partners access to needed information. Back in the paper world, a customer would receive one copy of a document but might have to distribute that information to multiple manufacturers who also needed to see it. Now they can set up a community of people who need to see the document within the portal.

With the new system, customers can access report data from a single online location, regardless of where the end user is sitting. For example, a large international company may have dozens of locations around the world, each engaging with a local Intertek office. But there may be one manager at a headquarters location who wants to control and monitor all these activities and all the work Intertek performs. Because everyone at all locations can log in to the same portal, no one is left out of the loop.

One of My TestCentral’s biggest benefits is that it vastly decreases the number of paper documents customers must store. Siddiqui recounts how after a product is certified by Intertek, a field inspector may pay an unannounced visit to the Zodiac manufacturing facility to ensure that a product’s design, construction, and quality are maintained.

When that happens, Zodiac is required to have the most recent revision of certification files or listing reports available at the facility, because that document describes how the product is made. Now, staff members at Zodiac have immediate access to these documents through My TestCentral and no longer need to retain a hard copy.

“We used to have a room about 8 by 10 feet set aside just
for storing records,” Siddiqui says. “I still need an area to keep
old files, but for the last five years I haven’t had to continue
ordering filing cabinets every year, and I don’t have to keep
asking management for more physical space.”
employees from all over the globe. That helps speed projects
along when tests are performed or reports are written and
reviewed in multiple locations. Better yet, it allows projects to
be routed away from overburdened locations to ones where
engineers have fewer projects—increasing engineer utilization
in a human version of the process that makes cloud computing
more efficient.

“Each little step, from when the
document is first started to its
issuance to the customer, is visible
now, and that’s huge for us.”

—Dean Davidson, Vice President, Intertek

THE POWER OF TRACKING

After the success of My TestCentral, Intertek IT executives began wondering if there were more ways that Oracle Portal could help cut down on paper. The result was Report Manager, another custom-built portal, this one for internal use. This solution not only allows Intertek employees to reduce paper usage, but it has dramatically improved efficiency—merely by giving the workforce the means to track each report at every stage of its creation.

“Now we have end-to-end tracking for every one of our reports through Report Manager. Each little step, from when the document is first started to its issuance to the customer, is visible now, and that’s huge for us,” Davidson explains.

Report Manager also saves time by connecting Intertek

Minda Zetlin is coauthor with Bill Pfleging of The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology Professionals Don’t Understand Each Other and Why They Need Each Other to Survive (Prometheus Books, 2006).