eBusiness: Case studies

City West Water has reduced maintenance costs, eliminated paper based reporting and increased responsiveness with an integrated job management system and a new fleet of Next G handsets.

Back in 1999, Avnet's senior managers realized things had to change. A series of acquisitions had left the electronic components distributor with a glut of applications and platforms whose lack of interoperability was complicating operations. That problem stood directly in the way of the company's new goal of providing e-commerce services to its clients and expanding the company beyond traditional order management and delivery. Making good on the e-commerce promise required consistent results for clients, no matter where they might be or what channel they used.

Station Casinos' CIO and vice president of technology, Marshall Andrew, has two big reasons to be nervous this weekend.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, Shop.com wants its Web site running as smoothly and quickly as possible. An hour of slow service could cost the Californian company hundreds of thousands of dollars, company officials say.

Burzin Engineer spends the entire year getting ready for three Mondays in November and December.

In the high stakes world of casino gambling, customer loyalty often trumps liquidity.

National health club chain Fitness First is using automated address matching software to cut down on the costs of collecting outstanding debts.

GPS navigation provider TomTom has based its entire customer facing feedback portal on the RightNow Service module to offer 24x7 customer feedback globally.

Despite rolling out new, interactive technologies and experiencing a 43 percent increase in online traffic, the US Open reduced the number of servers it needed to power its Web site from 60 to nine during the 14-day event this year.

Meridian Credit Union -- Ontario's largest credit union -- recently rolled out a range of new software tools that allow its tellers to look customers in the eye.

The supply chain at Whirlpool in 2000 was broken. Indeed, a manager there at the time quipped that among the four major appliance makers in the U.S., Whirlpool ranked fifth in delivery performance.