Bombardier lays flexible portal foundation for new online services and competitive edge

Growth is good, but every so often it is worthwhile to stop, review where growth has taken you, and plot the path ahead. Such has been the experience of Bombardier, Inc. Founded in 1942 by the inventor of the world’s first snowmobile, this Canadian company has evolved into a Fortune Global 500 conglomerate with annual revenues of US$17.5 billion and 60,000 employees. Retaining its focus on innovative transportation solutions, Bombardier today encompasses two main divisions: Bombardier Aerospace for aircraft production and services and Bombardier Transportation for railway production and services.

As Bombardier grew through acquisitions, it deployed several enterprise portals as well as a number of Web sites and application-specific portals. But when the company examined its overall Web presence from the viewpoint of its external constituents, it realized it had a problem. Too many Web sites and applications were being delivered externally, and they were not integrated or consistent: they had different URLs, branding and navigation, and each required a different user name and password.

Bombardier wanted to strengthen its brand by presenting an image of itself as one company, but its Web presence was broadcasting the opposite. Customers noticed the disconnect as they navigated the company’s multiple Web sites with different passwords and dealt with duplicate data entry requirements. They also had a hard time finding information.

Bombardier’s customer ratings had fallen and were getting worse. Additionally, the effort required to develop new applications had become overwhelming because the company didn’t have a way to leverage reusable assets.

Company management plans renovated Web presence to yield multiple rewards
In response to these symptoms and the company’s overarching goal of building a unified brand image, Bombardier management decided to develop a strategic architecture and an enterprise-wide portal. This would bring sharper focus to its business vision and objectives, help develop more advanced integration strategies and establish a method for all future portal-related development.

With the new architecture and portal in place, the company would be able to consolidate information and services for all its constituents; provide easier access to information; increase revenues through improved communications with customers and the provision of new services; and improve efficiency through better collaboration among employees and partners. Bombardier also anticipated being able to lower its costs by offering more self-service options; reducing the effort and cycle time for developing and deploying new services and applications; and simplifying support and operation of its applications and infrastructure.

Architecture and portal strategy generates requirements
An internal strategy group was formed to define the company’s enterprise architecture and portal strategy. The group recognized early on that it could not think about an enterprise portal in isolation from all the interconnected elements; instead, the group considered the entire “portal ecosystem” and looked at this from many angles to generate requirements.

In addition to portals, the group knew it wanted search and Web content management capabilities, as well as tooling to support rapid application development. Security was a major requirement, as was the ability to create composite applications. The group set a standard that every component built would have to be reusable, be mapped to a business function and reside in a repository where other developers could find it for reuse in the context of their projects—creating, in essence, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

With its requirements in order and some opportunities identified for quick hits on a new portal, the group considered solutions from several top portal vendors. Bombardier already used IBM middleware and data integration technology as well as a lot of IBM hardware, IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. The company employed an SAP portal to serve its portal content and expected to continue using it for that purpose, but it also had other applications running on different platforms. This heterogeneous infrastructure meant the company needed what it called a “horizontal portal”—a platform that it could plug other modules into and that could integrate with many different back-end systems.

Careful investigation leads to flexible portal solution
After carefully considering the portal platforms available from competing vendors, Bombardier selected IBM WebSphere Portal. With its workflow capabilities and core portal services that aggregate applications and content, this would form the standard for Bombardier’s portal technology and business application integration. The company also chose IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory software to streamline portlet and Web application development for fast creation and deployment of composite applications, as well as the WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer tool, which offers prebuilt integration for existing applications such as Bombardier’s Lotus Notes applications. These products would allow the portlets to be exposed as services in the architecture. IBM OmniFind would provide the portal search engine.

The first portal implementations are launched
Sean Terriah of Bombardier Aerospace and head of the Solution Architecture Group within Bombardier’s centralized IT organization helped start up the portal project. “We overhauled the environment to get the portal ecosystem in place,” he explains. “Once the foundation was laid, the objective was to engage the business leaders in discussion of opportunities for providing online services to their customers and suppliers.”

A team led by Terriah held visioning workshops to learn what the various business units wanted to see on the portal. Terriah also created a roadmap showing which features would appear in successive releases, and his team embarked on creating the first release of the portal, which went live in June of 2007.

Customer portal offers customers self-service options
The first implementation was a portal for the Bombardier Aerospace Division that would provide self-service to customers—the aircraft owners. The work initially entailed migrating content and services from two of Bombardier’s existing Web sites—one for regional aircraft and the other for business aircraft—onto the WebSphere Portal platform. The new portal gives customers access to technical manuals and service bulletins residing in Lotus Notes forms and documents, as well as alerts and news of upcoming events.

To create this portal, Bombardier Aerospace relied heavily on WebSphere Portlet Factory to expose the Lotus Notes documents as services. These had been written over time in various formats and many looked rough on the page. WebSphere Portlet Factory simplified the process of retrofitting this content, reformatting it and making it presentable for surfacing through the portal.

The site supports certain aspects of the engineering, manufacturing and customer support processes. Content is personalized by aircraft program and user profile so that the information displayed to the end user only pertains to his or her fleet. For example, a customer who owns Learjet 45 aircraft wouldn’t be shown content related to Challenger aircraft or to regional aircraft. Users answer a few questions at sign-on that determine the appropriate content to display.

At first, most of the content was read-only. But as the portal ecosystem stabilized, more transactional functions came online, including self-service workflow applications that enable customers to do things like order spare parts, view order status and file warranty claims. If the customer wants to file a claim, for example, he can click on the pertinent sales order and complete the filing. A Bombardier employee enters the portal to review and validate the claim, and then approve or send it through a workflow for a higher level of approval if required. The customer can see the status of his claim and any comments related to it as it moves through this process, as well as respond to comments and provide additional feedback. The entire record is written directly into SAP.

Supplier portal eases external collaboration
The second instance of the portal focused on suppliers. Suppliers can use their portal to respond to specification discrepancies found in their manufactured parts, including viewing the notification of a discrepancy and explaining how they are going to correct it. A Bombardier employee reviews and validates the supplier’s response, then approves it or forwards it for higher approval. If the proposed measure is approved, the information is filed into a legacy system that handles vendor non-conformance of parts for further processing.

Portal ecosystem will support streamlined future development
Preparing the strategic architecture for these implementations and facilitating streamlined future development required substantial work. “The portal is just a component of an ecosystem of integrated components. You don’t just buy the portal product, install and configure it, and then go live. You also have to connect everything around it to make it work,” says Terriah.

That integration was the biggest challenge Bombardier faced with the first implementations: every service plugged into the portal had to have the same availability and reliability as the portal itself. For example, to provide 24x7 service to customers, every moving part of the portal ecosystem had to be available 24x7. Says Terriah, “Many of the components the portal relied on had to be reshaped to make sure they could all support the same service level agreement, which took getting a lot of people on board.”

The WebSphere Portal solution helps ensure that business logic is isolated from the presentation layer to enable the reuse of business components and creation of composite applications. This helps the project team “normalize” portal components and application development standards and guidelines, as well as support component modeling and generation. The reusable components will also help minimize use of nonstandard approaches and tools, and help reduce the number of custom applications that must be built from scratch. Terriah estimates that the overall effect will be lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and time to market for deploying additional portal components.

Bombardier portals produce business benefits
The Bombardier enterprise portal has helped simplify IT administration: there is now only one portal infrastructure to manage, and it supports both customers and suppliers. There is also just one platform and one brand for the company’s Web presence, helping to strengthen the perception of Bombardier as a single integrated company. Self-service capabilities give customers fast, convenient access to critical information whenever they need it, increasing customer satisfaction and the credibility of Bombardier as a valuable business partner.

Bombardier has also experienced greater efficiency as online interactions replace faxed communications and their high incidence of error and cumbersome manual follow-up. For example, suppliers used to send faxes that a Bombardier employee would need to manually enter into a back-end system. Frequently, some of the data supplied would be wrong or illegible, necessitating further follow-ups and rework. Moving the warranty claims and validations online has radically reduced the amount of time and effort spent getting claims filed correctly, and this time savings can now be applied to higher value work.

Improved efficiency also yields cost savings. The cost of developing and deploying new services and applications has been reduced now that Bombardier Aerospace has a simple way to integrate Lotus Notes applications into the portal; knows how to index content and expose it through the search capabilities; can orchestrate interactions with SAP; and can manage single sign-on.

Furthermore, developers have a considerable stockpile of reusable assets and services to leverage in new applications rather than starting every new project from scratch. Terriah reports that the cycle time for new application development has been notably shortened, while quality, integrity and integration factors have all improved. The portal infrastructure also helped the company reduce the cost of supporting and operating its applications and infrastructure, and this return on investment is expected to continue to grow over time.

The future looks bright
With its re-architected infrastructure and portal solution, Bombardier has laid a flexible, scalable foundation for rapid creation and easy integration of new online services that will support the company’s business objectives far into the future. The team’s hard work has paid off: portal usage has grown to about 25,000 registered users, with 2,000 logins per day. In addition to ongoing work on the portal implementations for customers and suppliers, the company transitioned Bombardier.com to run on the same WebSphere Portal platform.

Now, the company’s goal is to accelerate delivery of value to the business by creating new services supported by composite applications. Bombardier plans to deploy more self-service capabilities for customers and suppliers in the future.

Another avenue for new development concerns role-based distinctions and personalization. Currently, Bombardier Aerospace is not using the automated personalization features of WebSphere Portal, but intensive work is underway to set up identity management and role-based provisioning in the back-end systems. Examples of different roles include owners, pilots and maintenance workers, each of which is looking for very specific information. With the role-specific content, users will be able to tailor what they want to see in terms of private versus public information, timeframes, portlets and RSS feeds.

Bombardier is expanding internationally and will soon need to work with overseas suppliers and partners. The new portal infrastructure will be able to handle those requirements as well, says Terriah. “With our investments in WebSphere Portal technology and SOA, we now have an agile delivery platform in place to support our business priorities of offering an ‘amazing customer experience’ and collaboration capabilities with our extended partners.”

Summarizing the overall benefits of Bombardier’s new portal solution, Terriah says, “The portal allows us to be more competitive. We see what others are doing, but we think we’ve gained a competitive advantage with the infrastructure we have in place today.”

For more information
For more information about IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory, IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM OmniFind and IBM WebSphere Information Integrator, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/software/lotus