Taking Care of e-Business – How the e-Business Consortium at UW-Madison gives companies a competitive advantage.

Picture this.

You’re the Midwest’s biggest apparel retailer, and for the past six years, your global e-commerce Web sites have generated well over $500 million in sales.

But you’ve reached a critical turning point.

By Bill Shepard

http://www.corprelations.wisc.edu/buswire/leadstory/200501.php

To stay competitive, your Web site needs a significant upgrade, requiring major research, planning and huge sums of money. In short, your decisions could make or break your continued e-commerce success.

Where do you turn for guidance? Who would you trust to provide informed, well-researched recommendations?

If you are Lands’ End Inc., you would rely on a tried-and-true partner: the University of Wisconsin-Madison e-Business Consortium (http://www.uwebc.org), Wisconsin’s leading university-industry partnership that helps companies stay competitive through e-business and e-commerce. The consortium, in its seventh year, helps companies address a host of complex issues, including information security, customer relationship management, supply chain management, radio frequency identification (RFID), and in the case of Lands’ End, Web strategy and marketing.

"In 2005, we will launch a series of new Web sites on an entirely new platform, employing state-of-the-art features," says Bert Kolz, director of e-commerce at Lands’ End, the Dodgeville, Wis.-based manufacturer of traditionally styled clothing, soft luggage and products for the home. "So we set up a student project with the UW e-Business Consortium, and as a result we have a raft of recommendations that are helping us guide our decisions and wisely spend millions of dollars on enhancing our Web sites."

With guidance from Kolz and Raj Veeramani, director of the UW e-Business Consortium and a UW-Madison professor in the College of Engineering and in the School of Business, the graduate student project team focused specifically on Lands’ End’s Web sites geared toward the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. The team conducted an extensive analysis of competitors’ Web sites in the three countries. Using a systematic approach, the student team developed a "Web site evaluation tool" to conduct a comparative analysis of general site features, product page features, bag/cart-related features and shopping-related features.

Using the tool, the project team graded competitors’ Web sites in each country, indicating the best overall sites, as well as a ranking of the most desirable features. The team also focused on best practices employed by the competitors’ online shopping sites and took into account unique cultural issues, such as mobile phone use in Japan.

"Their recommendations hit the nail right on the head, in most cases reinforcing similar conclusions reached by Lands’ End’s internal Web teams in Europe and Japan," Kolz says.

Yet this was not the first instance in which the consortium had provided its expertise to Lands’ End. Having joined the group when it was founded in 1998, Lands’ End has tapped the UW e-Business Consortium’s valuable multidisciplinary resources on several student projects from 1999 to the present.

"We’ve been utilizing UW e-Business Consortium’s student teams for so long that we have incorporated them into our regular planning process for Web site development," comments Kolz.

That kind of strategic alignment between the consortium and Lands’ End vividly illustrates the powerful benefits of consortium membership. There are 53 member companies in the consortium, ranging from Harley-Davidson Motor Co. to Kraft Foods to American Family Insurance. These and other consortium members in fields such as biotechnology, energy, government, telecommunications, retail, distribution, finance and professional services all have benefited in countless ways from membership.

"In e-business, industry pressures are very complex, as they encompass a range of organizational structures and business processes within each of the consortium’s member companies," explains Veeramani. "The brightest e-business minds at UW-Madison — multidisciplinary student teams and faculty — collaborate on holistic solutions to the challenges faced by member companies."

Marketing, operations and information management, industrial and systems engineering, and computer science are just a handful of the various academic disciplines that the campuswide consortium can bring to the table in tackling member companies’ issues and problems. Much of the work is accomplished through projects that entail either teams of students or individual students who focus in-depth on a given problem, all under the guidance of UW-Madison faculty and consortium staff.

"Companies often are not able to fully commit the time and resources needed for their respective e-business initiatives," Veeramani notes. "By tapping into the collective knowledge of the students, faculty and especially peer companies in the consortium, member companies can leverage the strength of the consortium to their advantage and minimize the risks associated with addressing complex e-business issues on their own."

He adds that students in the consortium "think outside the box, offering objective, fresh creative input to member companies."

The UW e-Business Consortium offers other unique advantages as well:

* Sharing ideas, avoiding risks and costs: The consortium’s Peer Group program enables members to efficiently make informed decisions that lead to e-business success. Through interactive peer group sessions, involving either one-on-one discussions or small group settings, members share best practices, validate each other’s strategies and ultimately reduce financial and business risks.
* Rigorous methodology and assessment tools: UW e-Business Consortium members have access to decision aids, best practice guidelines and opinion papers that are based on research done by consortium staff and the experiences of member companies. Examples include information security and content management best practices, a customer relationship management return on investment calculator and an overview of the latest enterprise spam filtering techniques and tools.
* Professional development events: Members can maintain a competitive edge through conferences, workshops and summits focusing on e-business principles and best practices addressed by national experts and industry leaders. At these events, members also learn about the benefits of emerging technologies and business strategies.
* Pioneering workgroups: The consortium’s workgroups allow members with a shared interest in a specific topic to collaboratively seek answers to critical questions relating to that topic. For example, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) work group concentrates its efforts on the emerging technology of RFID tags. (Consisting of silicon chips and an antenna that can transmit data to a wireless receiver, RFID tags are an emerging technology that will revolutionize the way businesses track, trace and manage assets.)
* The UW e-Business Institute: Established in 2003, the UW e-Business Institute complements the company-specific projects and peer interaction that occur in the consortium. The institute also engages in research and industrywide outreach activities that foster the e-business-enabled economic development of Wisconsin industry clusters. Current activities include a National Science Foundation grant focused on innovation in Wisconsin’s plastics industry cluster and research on RFID technology in the new University of Wisconsin RFID Lab.

"When companies join the UW e-Business Consortium, they build a network of trusted, collaborative relationships with other members, as well as our students and faculty," Veeramani says.

These mutually beneficial relationships can potentially last a lifetime, offering invaluable benefits to each member company and, ultimately, its bottom line.

On another level, the UW e-Business Consortium plays a significant role in contributing to Wisconsin’s economic development by strengthening and building ties among Wisconsin-based consortium members.

But Kolz is quick to point out that the consortium enables companies such as Lands’ End to enrich the lives of UW-Madison students.

"We’re here to sell products, grow our company and provide jobs to people," Kolz says. "But we also believe that as good corporate citizens, companies like ours can provide students with tremendous opportunities to learn and grow professionally through our involvement with the consortium."

File last updated: January 3, 2005

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