Inner Beauties
Here's how Children's Orchard, a franchiser of children's discount stores, uses an intranet to alert franchisees to news about new products and unite them under a common corporate identity.
State of the Art
Lovely to look at, delightful to use, intranets may be your best bet for improving communication
Michael Spehn had just hit pay dirt. Rooting through three cartons of Beanie Babies that had recently arrived at his Children's Orchard franchise in Lake Forest, Calif., he had discovered a dozen red-white-and-blue Glory the Bears, worth $30 or more apiece to some collectors. Elated, Spehn displayed the limp little trophies to his manager, Colette Frenoy, who was arranging the more pedestrian Whisper the Deers and Smoochy the Frogs out on the floor where Spehn's regulars would see them as soon as they entered.
Fifteen minutes later Frenoy poked her head into the back office, where Spehn was fiddling with a laptop computer. "Here they come--coming up the walk!" she called. Sure enough, two thirtyish women were just navigating the jungle of play sets and strollers growing on the sidewalk in front of the low-slung tan building. Pushing open the door, they spied the newly arrived Beanies and headed straight for them.
These women, like many of Spehn's customers, visit Children's Orchard several times a week, searching for Beanies or onesies or toddlers' pink footie pajamas. "Their kids are growing a size a month," says Spehn of his regulars, so shopping is a never-ending chore. Spehn wants most of that shopping to take place at his store, and he knows the only way to make that happen is to constantly refresh the inventory.
Spehn's strategy is echoed by the owners of all 23 Children's Orchard franchises in Southern California, which must constantly compete against time--and other children's discount stores--to snap up manufacturers' toy and clothing overstocks. Getting out word of available merchandise is a duty that falls to Spehn, who in addition to owning the Lake Forest store is also a western regional manager for the $18-million company based in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Until recently, playing town crier to the other franchisees meant making 22 phone calls, and by the time number 22's phone rang, numbers one and two had frequently snapped up the best deals. But that problem went away last winter, when Children's Orchard launched a corporate intranet. The network was the idea of CEO Walter Hamilton, who wanted to unite the company's 91 franchisees around operational standards and a common corporate identity. An early and eager user, Spehn became so enamored of the technology that he spun off a separate intranet just for Southern California.
Now Spehn relies on that intranet to support the franchisees in his region--by alerting them instantly to offers of new merchandise or to product recalls, for example. And he is doing everything in his power to get the franchisees to rely on the network as well. "If they aren't connected to the intranet, they learn about the transactions too late," he explains. "That puts them out of the supply loop. You can't sell what you don't have."
An intranet is basically a Web site that lives behind a company's firewall and serves only its employees. Built on the same communications protocols as the Internet and using the same system of hypertext links, intranets have become the darlings of large corporations. Now small businesses are embracing intranets as well, attracted by their relative economy (compared with paper communications and traditional client/server networks), simplicity (employees navigate using garden-variety browsers), and flexibility (software programs and information are available regardless of location, format, or platform).
Mirroring the development of the Web, most early intranets were essentially publishing mechanisms populated by company phone directories and newsletters. Today's intranets, in contrast, are as interactive as they want to be, replete with chat rooms, fill-in forms, and team work spaces. As a result some companies are starting to move critical business processes to the networks. For example, at NetResponse, a 60-employee Internet consultancy in Arlington, Va., account managers use an intranet to enter client data and track billable hours, while designers collaborate on mock-ups of Web pages.
As for infrastructure, with intranets it need not be elaborate. "With a small number of users you don't really need the latest systems," says Mark Levitt, research director for the International Data Corp., based in Framingham, Mass. A Microsoft Windows NT server with TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/ Internet protocol) and Web-server software should do the trick. As for creating content, employees can save simple documents in HTML (the Web's lingua franca) using such products as Microsoft's Word 97, Lotus WordPro, and Corel WordPerfect Suite 7. Companies with more extensive sites might choose Microsoft's FrontPage, Adobe PageMill, or FileMaker's HomePage 3.0. In addition, a number of vendors are introducing just-add-water intranet packages targeted at small and midsize companies. (See "Package Deals," below.)
Of course, intranets, like any technology, have their dark side. There may be security threats. Democratic by nature, intranets sometimes threaten organizations in which information is jealously guarded. The technology's trademark openness can degenerate into laxness. (Picture company secrets leaked or harassment charges filed.) Although these problems have solutions--firewalls, password protection, backup procedures, management education, content filtering tools, usage guidelines--if not resolved up front, they can kill the project in its cradle.
For many companies the two biggest challenges are getting people to use the intranet and keeping content fresh--and the two are closely related. Employees will abandon an intranet if what they find there isn't interesting or germane, says David Leveen, cofounder of Cognitive Communications, a strategic-communications company in New York City. That's the chicken; the egg is that in order to have interesting and germane content you must first have employees who visit and contribute to the site. It's a quandary that companies can avoid from the get-go by cramming their intranets with information and applications that people need to do their jobs. Leveen suggests asking employees: "What types of information would you like to get easily from each business unit? What are some things you've always wanted but haven't had access to?"
Cognitive's own intranet--affectionately dubbed Blah Blah--supports the company's team-based structure with sections like Hot Plate, where graphic artists, writers, and technologists can comment on projects, and Deep Thoughts, a threaded discussion group for more profound conversations about work in progress. Company meetings, including weekly "lunch and learn" sessions, are generally extended on-line. Blah Blah, says Leveen, "is an employee lounge, strategic command center, and family doctor" all in one.
