Bridge Work - Pergo renovates web site - Brief Article

In December 1999, managers at Swedish floor-coverings manufacturer Pergo found themselves in a fix. At the time, corporate customers of the $360 million-in-revenues division of Perstop placed orders by phone or fax or via EDI. But many of its smaller retail clients weren't equipped for EDI.

Management wanted to Web-enable the entire process, but the company was in the midst of an ERP rollout. "We wanted a head start and couldn't wait until ERP was installed," recalls Henrik Malmrup, Pergo's manager of new ventures. But the possibility of conflicts between the two systems worried management.

The solution; an enterprise business portal. Designed by Intentia, a Swedish e-collaboration vendor, the portal enables Pergo's ecommerce and EDI systems to interface with any type of platform or software. Thus, when Pergo's ERP rollout is completed in the second quarter of 2001, the ecommerce application can simply be slotted in.

So far, the portal has lived up to expectations, says Malmrup. He admits the company would like to add some functionality to the site, but the laying in of the ecommerce system before the ERP rollout focused the company squarely on customers--not back-office functions. That's good, says Stefan Elmer, an Internet analyst with IDC in Denmark. "When companies take their ERP system as a starting point," he says, "they sometimes get pages that look like a database."

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