Princeton, New Jersey
Industry - Manufacturing
GE plastics Customers Find A Home
On The Net
Web Provides Timely Data
CMP Publications via First! GE Plastics, a $5 billion subsidiary of General Electric, manufacturers industrial-grade plastics used by companies like Motorola for computer equipment and Chrysler for automobile components. GE Plastics provides technical documentation on its products to customers via a customer-support telephone line. According to recent estimates, GE Plastics logs about 80,000 customer calls per year. But the company wanted a more efficient, automated approach to disseminating large amounts of technical information.
The answer was the Internet and the World Wide Web.
"Our customer base is very high-tech, involved in markets and applications where product life-cycles are very crunched, and development needs are intense," said Don Adamus, a spokesperson for GE Plastics. By the time a computer manufacturer, for example, gets a product out the door, it will have already begun planning that product's replacement, Adamus said.
Manufacturers need up-to-date information about the properties of plastics like Cycolac and Noryl in order to design next-generation products today, Adamus said.
Customers have been able to dial in to a phone bank in Pittsfield, Mass., for that information, but GE wanted to get the information out even faster.
In looking for an alternative means of providing technical support, GE considered offering CD-ROMs, but the company decided it wanted to be able to update the information rapidly and offer the service of an interactive basis. The World Wide Web was the obvious choice.
Now GE Plastics customers can connect via the Internet to http://plastics@www.ge.com and browse through 1,500 pages of information and specifications about chemical products and services.
A League Of Its Own
The application is unusual in several ways. For one thing, it's BIG: 1,500 pages. Most businesses post only a few pages of data.
The fact that GE Plastics is offering technical support for non-computer products is also unusual. Most of the other support sites on the Internet are for computer products, many of them products that are used to access the Net.
In addition, the application is significantly more mission-critical than other commercial Web sites, many of which tend to be marketing- or entertainment-related.
The application is unusual also in its architecture. The Web site runs on a Sun Microsystems SPARCserver 10 in General Electric's network support center in Princeton, NJ. The database is maintained elsewhere, however, on a Pentium PC server located in the offices of Internet consultants One World Interactive Corp., Spencertown, NY. The PC has 32 Mbytes of memory and two 1-Gbyte disk drives.
The distributed-systems architecture provides robustness and security. Any potential hackers will only be able to look at and change copies of the data on the Sun front-end server, which can easily be corrected from the master database running on the Pentium server. The PC server is not accessible via the Internet, said Tim McEachern, president of One World.
On the flip side, any inadvertent administrator errors made on the target database on the PC won't effect users' ability to get at data residing on the Sun server.
"This is an approach that makes the Fortune 500 feel comfortable," said McEachern. "They're jittery about the Internet and putting their information on it."
The mirroring approach has worked pretty well, said McEachern. Ever since GE Plastics went on-line in October, the service has been up almost continuously and receiving 2,000 to 4,000 "hits" to the company's Web pages every day.
One World plans to put about 700 more pages of product information on the server within a month.
The only time the server has been down was for three days over Thanksgiving weekend this year, when parent company General Electric took the entire company off the Internet while it investigated computer pirate break-ins. However, GE said the pirates did no damage to their systems. The break-in didn't effect GE Plastics' systems.
The World Wide Web site can be accessed using any browser, but GE Plastics gives its customers Internet In A Box, from Spry, of Seattle. Designed to be easy to install and use, it includes client E-mail, Gopher, file transfer, and a World Wide Web browser based on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' (NCSA) Mosaic.
The version distributed by GE Plastics is almost identical to the one Spry makes available at the retail level in computer stores. However, it's been modified to automatically log users into GE Plastics' home page, where they can access the database of product information and also participate in USENET-style discussion groups that can put users in contact with other users of GE Plastics products.
A Herculean Task
Getting 1,500 pages of data up onto the Internet was no easy task, said McEachern.
Hardware was not a problem, and neither was the Internet connection. One of the beauties of the Internet is that those things are commodities, said McEachern. The Sun server was selected as the front end because it met performance requirements, and GE had one to spare in its network center. The Pentium server was selected based on performance, price, and the vendor's ability to deliver it overnight.
The connection between the Pentium in upstate New York and the SPARCserver in New Jersey is through a Northern Telecom digital modem over a 56-Kbps dedicated line provided by Eastern Microwave Communications. The connection from the SPARCserver to the outside world of the Internet is through a T-1 connection provided by Global Enterprise Services.
But finding the right software was not so easy, said McEachern. While tools are now emerging for converting data from databases and word processing documents into a suitable format for the World Wide Web, they were not available over the summer, when GE Plastics was building its system. Moreover, the data had to be organized in a fashion that made it easy to update and view.
The information is stored in an Oracle database, and imported into the World Wide Web using tools custom-built for the job by One World. The tools convert SQL data into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) of Web documents and vice versa, said McEachern.
The software will also work with Word for Windows, WordPerfect, QuarkXPress, and Excel documents. One World plans to commercialize its so-called WebWare software late next year.
One Big Web
The GE Plastics effort is part of the larger Internet connectivity offered by General Electric. The GE home page also offers information on GE's financial and research arms.
The company also owns an information service General Electric Information Service (GEIS), which has a subsidiary consumer on-line service called GEnie.
However, GE Plastics chose to use the Internet rather than GEIS or GEnie for its connectivity because the Internet offered access to a wider user base - an estimated 20 to 30 million Internet users worldwide, compared with less than 2 million for any individual on-line service.
The Internet also provides access to technical and government information not available on other on-line services, said GE's Adamus.
"The Internet has been an active medium for the technically oriented, the scientific and engineering community," said Rick Pocok, general manager of marketing communications for General Electric.
"We thought this would be a natural home for our customers." Once GE brings its customers onto the Internet, they find other resources there as well, said Pocok.
GE Plastics' System Include:
- SPARCserver 10
- Pentium PC server - for database maintenance
- Internet In A Box from Spry, or Seattle
- Northern Telecom digital modem
- 56-Kbps dedicated line by Eastern Microwave Communications
- T-1 connection by Global Enterprise Services
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