Nestlé
World’s Largest Food Company Consolidates Web Presence on .NET Enterprise Servers
Published: January 2002
With hundreds of globally recognized brands, Nestlé had a Web presence that had grown spontaneously without any single direction. This led to a highly fragmented environment that Nestlé could not easily or affordably manage. The company realized the value of consolidating on one single platform and, after considering UNIX-based alternatives, chose to build its solution using the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers. Nestlé USA now is using the Internet to collect and leverage information about consumers and drive new marketing initiatives. With the .NET Enterprise Servers, Nestlé USA built a manageable, affordable, secure Web venture and is using it to add value to the enterprise. Nestlé has begun implementing this solution at its other sites around the world.
Situation
With a total workforce of approximately 225,000 people in some 479 factories worldwide, Nestlé is not only Switzerland's largest industrial company but also the world's largest food company. Nestlé products are available in nearly every country around the world. Alpo dog food, Perrier mineral water, Baby Ruth candy bars, Taster’s Choice coffee, and Stouffer’s frozen foods are just a few of the hundreds of Nestlé brands that are recognized worldwide.
The problem facing Nestlé was that its Web presence had grown spontaneously and was fragmented. Each brand’s Internet presence had been developed as an independent project and there was no continuity. With some 350 different Web sites, virtually every type of hosting platform and development environment was being used by one of the divisions. As a result, it was very difficult and expensive for Nestlé to manage these Internet entities, make them interact with each other, or gather any meaningful information from them.
Nestlé wanted to consolidate its Web presence on one single platform, organize the individual sites in a logical manner, and leverage the Internet operation to add value to the enterprise. Standardization of the Internet platform would provide Nestlé with stability, reliability, scalability, and security. This consolidation of technology would also result in a more affordable operation.
“We really felt that we had to invest in an infrastructure that was going to take us forward and not fall apart on us,” says Jeri Dunn, Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Nestlé USA. “Microsoft has really come a long way in developing tool sets that make the implementation of their platforms much simpler for the enterprise customer. “
Solution
Nestlé decided to build its new, consolidated Internet operation using the Microsoft® .NET Enterprise Servers. “Between our staff and the Microsoft consulting staff, we very quickly had the architecture defined,“ says Francois Jolles, Director of E-Business Information Systems at Nestlé USA. “We started by selecting a common hosting facility and installed the hardware and the network. Then we installed the operating system and a database using Windows® 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition, and Microsoft Commerce Server 2000. Next, we built different components on top of that to address the different needs that are common across all the Web sites.”
The flexibility of the Microsoft platform allowed Nestlé to quickly develop its own component-based Web architecture—the Nestlé Internet Resource Framework (NIRF). “Basically, we split the Web site into seven layers, following the OSI [Open Systems Interconnection] model,” says Jolles. “We defined that six of those layers can be common across all of the Web sites. Only the presentation layer will be specific to each brand’s site.”
When creating or developing a Web site, the flexibility of the .NET environment allows Nestlé developers to use components to build the individual Web sites. Jolles appreciates the functionality and usability of the build method, likening it to giving a developer “a Lego box.” Says Jolles, “This tool box is made up…custom-developed tools [and] Microsoft tools that we’ve adapted and are able to make available to all of our Web site developers.”
“These components are pieces of ASP [Active Server Pages] code that we have developed and are using with common back-end tools like Commerce Server 2000,” Jolles continues. “We intend to reuse these components globally. We intend to expand this component tool box with more functionality and more tools, adding new products as they become available from Microsoft.”
Meanwhile, Nestlé is moving forward on a global scale, using the same process to move old Nestlé Web sites to a common Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server–based infrastructure at its facilities around the world.
In time, Nestlé plans to use Microsoft Passport, rebranding it as a common registration component. This will not only provide Web site visitors with single sign-in convenience but will also help Nestlé with the accumulation of user data. “It will help consumers understand that Nestlé is one large corporation, and it will allow us to collect registration data from the users,” says Jolles. The commitment to the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers will allow Nestlé to utilize other existing Web services and create its own Web services as future needs dictate.
Benefits
Nestlé’s decision to consolidate on a solution using the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers was driven by many factors. Among the reasons were cost, manageability, security, and confidence in Microsoft’s ability to provide enterprise-level solutions to large global companies like Nestlé. “We had worked with Microsoft on other significant initiatives and felt that they were someone we wanted to strategize with in the long term for our Internet platform,” says Vice President Dunn.
Adds Jolles, “Using Microsoft .NET as our common Web environment allows us to monitor and manage all the Web sites very easily and make sure that those sites are available to the consumers 24/7. It also helps us understand where the problems are coming from and how to solve those problems before they appear.”
Looking further into the future, Nestlé recognizes that the Microsoft .NET initiative is committed to open standards and emerging technologies. “With its scalability, availability, and manageability, our commitment to the Microsoft .NET initiative will definitely help us move forward with our goal to expand Nestlé’s B2B [business-to-business] and B2C [business-to-consumer] presence on the Internet,“ says Jolles.
When compared with the UNIX-based solutions that the company considered, a primary advantage of the Microsoft solution is that Nestlé actually owns the process of developing Web sites. Nestlé wanted to be able to quickly change and add Web sites to coincide with promotional and marketing initiatives. It also wanted to add a sense of commonality among the many brands’ Web sites. In short, the company wanted to control the development process. In the past, Nestlé had relied on external contractors to build systems. A UNIX solution would have meant continuing to rely on outside development sources. Actually owning the development process itself assures Nestlé of the greatest control over the resulting Web sites.
Cost of Ownership
Migrating to a common Microsoft environment offered Nestlé cost benefits when compared with UNIX-based solutions. These savings were based not only on hardware but also on the ability to effectively develop and manage the solution with existing information technology staff, eliminating the reliance on expensive, outside developers. “We did not have the right competencies on board and to acquire competent UNIX developers would cost a lot of money,” says Jolles. “Most of our staff was already trained on the Microsoft environment.”
Nestlé also determined that there was a correlation between integration and cost. “With UNIX, you have to choose all kinds of different tools that in some cases work together and in other cases do not,” says Jolles. “Developers must spend valuable time working out these integration issues. With the Microsoft platform, we were able to select the whole Microsoft suite of products and everything fit together seamlessly. For us, this meant that the cost of integration, which is generally the highest cost for developing an enterprise solution like ours, was drastically reduced.”
A return-on-investment (ROI) study revealed that the migration to the Microsoft platform had a payback period of just six months.
Agility
The benefits of Nestlé’s migration are not only based on cost savings. The inherent agility of the Microsoft platform gives the company another important business advantage. Because Nestlé has standardized on the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, its development teams are able to spend less time trying to find the appropriate tool set and more time developing solutions that consumers and business partners will see. “Of course, you save money by standardizing on one platform,” says Jolles. “But, for us, the savings are not just because of the improved manageability. It's also because of the speed with which we can get a Web site or an intranet or an extranet application developed.”
Nestlé attributes this time-to-market advantage to the fact that it has developed the framework around the Microsoft platform. “It’s very quick to develop a new site because the developer just uses the tool box that we have in our Microsoft environment,” says Jolles. “We can have new sites up quickly without incurring too much cost. For example, we can build Web sites that only support a six-week promotion. The cost of developing Web sites has been reduced to a point that it is affordable for us to do that.”
Managing Consumer Information
“From a total business perspective, the consumer is what business is all about for Nestlé,” says Dunn. Standardization on the Microsoft platform is allowing Nestlé to gather consumer information and get it into the hands of the people who need it most—the executive staff. Nestlé now can look at common threads that go across its many brands and develop new marketing initiatives.
Once the information has been gathered, Nestlé needs to deliver it to executives in an easy-to-use format. “They don't want to go into SAP and query SAP tables,” says Jolles. “They want information displayed to them on a dashboard. With the .NET strategy, we have the ability to get information from varying sources and display it out to the executives where decisions that are important to the business can be made. Our executives are already familiar with Microsoft Excel, with Microsoft Word, and with Microsoft products in general. We view the Internet and the Microsoft .NET environment as being able to connect information with tools that executives already know.
“With the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers platform, what we've been able to do is put up our sites, integrate them, and start storing the information that we get from our consumers across our Web sites so we can target market to those particular consumers where we think there can be a common interest. The value of that kind of information is real to the business, real to the bottom line.”
The approach that Nestlé took in consolidating its Web sites is based on themes about the ways that people live. For Nestlé, the object was to link these themes together and find common interests among consumers. “When you think about the ways that people live, you have categories,” says Jolles. “For instance, a pet owner goes to the Very Best Pet site and sees all of the products that focus around pet care and nutrition. A new mother goes to the Very Best Baby Web site and finds products specific to her needs and interests. What we’ve been able to do is put these sites up, integrate them, and start storing the information that we get from our consumers as they move across our Web sites. This allows us to target-market to those particular consumers where we think there can be a common interest.”
This type of integration among 350 Web sites would be very difficult and very expensive if Nestlé were not standardized on one technology platform. With the consolidated solution built on the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, Nestlé has the agility to easily build, integrate, and track movement across its many Web sites—yielding marketing intelligence that is valuable to the enterprise.
An Enterprising Partnership
“When we asked Microsoft about helping us create this platform, they were very responsive in providing help from Microsoft Consulting Services,” says Dunn. “We therefore achieved our goal of getting to market quickly with this infrastructure.”
Perhaps nothing is more important to an enterprise-level Web initiative than security. Dunn was happy to find that Microsoft shared his concerns. “Obviously as the CIO of a multibillion-dollar company, security is always at the forefront of my brain,” he says. “I don't want to be one of the CIOs whose name ends up on the front of a magazine because my Web site was hacked into and defaced. We really worked very hard with Microsoft, with their team here at Nestlé USA, and in their labs to develop a security solution that could be rolled out standardized across our desktop and for our Web servers.”
Nestlé is impressed with the way that Microsoft has listened to and addressed the needs of enterprise customers in general. “Microsoft is definitely listening to their enterprise customers,” says Jolles. “They’ve clearly shown us that they want to understand our business and are developing technology to help us move forward with our business. Microsoft has been a partner with Nestlé for a few years already and we see this relationship being strengthened by the way Microsoft is approaching large accounts like us. I see our relationship and our partnership expanding in the future.”
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