Case Study: Automotive OEM

Challenge

• After already realizing the benefits of a portal to communicate and collaborate with suppliers, automotive manufacturers needed a reliable out-sourced solution that would free them to focus on continually improving business processes with suppliers.
• Managing a supplier portal internally was expensive and time-consuming. They were responsible for all aspects of development, maintenance and administration of the portal, including the challenges of security, content management, supplier registration, identity management, and help desk support, and all in multiple languages.
• The investment in technology required continual upkeep and maintenance fees; changing security threats and regulatory requirements demanded full-time attention; and help desk support for the supplier web environment was growing out of control.
• They realized that their employees could be better utilized by improving core business processes with suppliers as opposed to maintaining the supplier portal infrastructure.
• Even within a single company, there were regional supplier websites that were completely independent and had the same inefficiencies as those websites from multiple companies.

Solution

• Covisint provided a collaborative, intuitive, and economical portal environment that provided suppliers with a single point of entry and a common user ID.
• A common help desk, with global toll free numbers, available 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week with multi-language capability enables involvement of suppliers worldwide and improves global collaboration between the customers and their suppliers.
• Integrated into Covisint's solution are the Supplier Bulletin and Library Services tools that allow suppliers to subscribe to pertinent categories of information across all customers and receive a single subscription email with all of the information they request.
• Covisint reduces the expense of maintaining the portal software and hardware infrastructure by using a common, best-of-breed platform to serve all customers within the industry.

Results

• By discontinuing their internally developed systems and selecting Covisint, these companies achieved a lower-cost, higher-traffic, and highly comprehensive portal solution to securely share information with suppliers.
• The switching costs were minimized through a simple migration tool, enabling existing users to keep their current grants across customer and consolidate to a single Covisint user ID. Backend applications hosted at each customer site did not undergo any changes, thanks to the elegance of the Covisint solution design.
• Aside from the expected benefits of cost savings and improved supply chain communications, Covisint's customers have won awards from technology magazines, praising their supply chain agility, achieved in large part due to Covisint. Other customers have noted the additional benefit of achieving consolidated visibility to supplier activities globally.
• Applications and information are secured such that only users with proper roles and permissions have access.