Case Study

Savvion Streamlines Content Management for 3Com Web Sites Worldwide

3Com Gains Significant Time and Cost Savings by Developing an Automated Web Publishing System with Savvion

When you’re a global networking giant like 3Com, you serve the world. You need to deliver up-to-date information about your products and initiatives to customers in more than 45 countries—and you need to deliver it in a timely, efficient, and consistent manner. To do so, 3Com turned to Savvion, using Savvion’s business process management (BPM) platform to build a Web content management system for its multitude of country-specific Web sites. The automated publishing system now streamlines the initiation, review, and publishing of new Web content for 3Com operations across North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Mexico.
“Savvion BusinessManager™ is a flexible platform that enables us to automate business processes quickly, including the global management of our Web site content—an arduous task from an international perspective,” explains Ari Bose, CIO at 3Com. “Using Savvion’s BPM platform, we’ve been able to speed approval cycles, automate translation and localization tasks, and track project status in real time, resulting in significant time and cost savings.”

A New Frontier
3Com previously handled its global Web content management using Lotus Notes. Although functional, the solution relied heavily on e-mail and required staff in such countries as Taiwan and China to use dial-up access, reducing efficiency and productivity. As part of its plans to enhance its Web sites, 3Com began its search for a better Web publishing system.

A team led Kathleen O’Neill, 3Com Information Management Director, evaluated 12 vendor solutions based on their ability to integrate with 3Com’s diverse systems environment and meet 3Com requirements for scalability, reliability, and ease of use. Within two months, Savvion BusinessManager emerged as the winning platform.

“Of all the workflow solutions, Savvion BusinessManager was the simplest to use, the easiest to maintain, and the most functional, being based on pure Java and XML,” O’Neill explains. “Its drag-and-drop design tools make it a cinch to create new automated business processes.”

Around the World in 60 Days
Once 3Com selected Savvion as its vendor of choice, the two companies began developing the global content management system. Savvion professional services provided development expertise, while 3Com personnel ensured close alignment of the system design with internal procedures. Demonstrating Savvion BusinessManager’s ease of use, it took O’Neill’s team just two days to learn how to create new automated processes.

“Using Savvion BusinessManager’s intuitive visual design tool, we built a graphical flowchart that identified each step in the Web content management process, including the people involved, other applications involved, and all interactions. Savvion BusinessManager then took the flowchart and automatically converted it into program code,” O’Neill explains. “3Com employees can now access the automated application from anywhere using a Web browser, speeding content management tasks.”

“The deadline for having the Web content management application up and running was identical to the rollout of 3Com’s new site,” adds Ryan Mills, 3Com Workflow Project Manager. “In the midst of designing the system, many of the processes now in place at 3Com were only being discussed. Fortunately, Savvion BusinessManager was flexible enough to accommodate changes dynamically.”

These changes included both minor and major revisions. For example, in the middle of the development phase, 3Com decided to have Regional Editors review content requests for local site changes. Near the end of development, the team also learned of a need to attach large files, for which Savvion provided a solution in four hours. Even more critically, 10 days before planned deployment, 3Com decided to launch the application over the Internet rather than its intranet to eliminate the need for select countries to log in to the 3Com network via dial-up connections—a change again handled quickly and efficiently.

In fact, it took only six weeks for the team to develop the content management application and two weeks to test the new system and incorporate end-user suggestions. Completed on schedule, 3Com’s Savvion BusinessManager-based Web publishing system went live in conjunction with the rollout of 3Com’s new Web site.

Simplicity Overcomes Global Complexities
Employees also agree that Savvion BusinessManager is easy to use. In just two days of on-site training, they can learn to initiate and track content updates in real time, send Web copy and graphic files, handle content translation activities, and generate helpful reports. Other system functions include legal reviews and automatic archiving of each update or change. Further increasing productivity, employees can even use a “Fast Track” process to speed approvals of minor changes, such as correcting typos.

“Savvion BusinessManager reduces by 30 percent the time that project managers previously needed to track and document projects by hand on paper,” Mills notes.

On the Horizon
Once 3Com deployed its global Web content management system, it began developing additional Savvion BusinessManager applications. Already, the networking leader has created a similar system to handle content updates for its partner Web sites, such as those for resellers worldwide. 3Com also used Savvion BusinessManager to develop an automated system that improves management of special price quote procedures between its sales department and 3Com distributors and resellers.

“3Com is renowned for its IT innovations,” adds John Koenigs, Savvion President and CEO. “We look forward to seeing how 3Com will use Savvion’s BPM platform to gain additional strategic efficiencies by streamlining business operations, enhancing management insight into critical business processes for real-time response, and supporting innovations that will drive its continued success.”