The Boeing Company
Company: BroadVisionCustomer: The Boeing CompanySubmitted by: Kinross and RenderDate: 2000The Boeing Company of Seattle, Washington, is the global aerospace industry’s biggest player with annual revenue of $58 billion. The company and its subsidiaries employ almost 190,000 people in more than 60 countries.For the last 40 years, Boeing has been the world leader in commercial flight, producing such well-known jetliners as the 747, 777 and MD-90. Indeed the company has more than 11,000 jetliners in service worldwide. And it offers 24/7 technical support to help operators maintain their carriers in peak operating condition.Boeing makes a wide range of fighter/attack aircrafts including the F/A-18 Hornet, F-15 Eagle, and the AV-8B Harrier.
As NASA’s leading contractor, the company has contributed to the U.S. space program by building the Space Shuttle orbiters. Boeing is also leading the U.S.
industry team for the International Space Station – the latter being the largest science and technology venture in history.More than ever, Boeing is a company on the move. It is continually expanding its products and services, and taking advantage of new technologies. As part of its drive to stay on top of e-business, the Boeing Commercial Airplanes Group has launched myboeingfleet.com—a large Internet portal that pulls together the division’s main information resources in one place using BroadVision technology.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Boeing is always looking for ways to extend the benefits of e-business and the Internet to its airline customers. The company launched Boeing On-Line Delivery (“BOLD”), a client-server based, on-line system that gave airlines and maintenance providers direct access to technical drawings, service bulletins and maintenance manuals in 1995. The company followed this initiative up the following year with PART Page, the aerospace industry’s first Web site for ordering and tracking parts shipments. The PART Page is used by 250 airlines, and 675 related companies.
In 1999 Boeing launched Flight Technical Services On-Line to provide flight-operations software and data to airlines over the Internet. More than 2,000 airline personnel have access to this site.Also in 1999, Boeing announced plans to migrate BOLD to a new, Web based system called Web BOLD. But the watershed announcement in the area of e-business and the Internet for airline customers came in May 2000 with the launch of myboeingfleet.com—a single source of online maintenance, engineering and flight operations data.This new portal is driven by BroadVision’s One-To-One e-business and Knowledge Management technology, which makes it possible for content to be customized for each user.
ABOUT THE SITE
This secure, password-protected Web site integrates Boeing’s current on-line offerings—Web BOLD, Flight Technical Services On-Line and PART Page -and it serves as the platform for new and expanded support and services coming down the pike.Initially myboeingfleet.com provides access to such information resources as engineering drawings, software, service bulletins, major flight and maintenance manuals for selected airplanes, maintenance tips, training and in-service activity reports. But in the coming months it will be expanded to encompass additional maintenance manuals, airplane flight and operations manuals, on-line catalogs and additional training.
WHY BROADVISION?
Boeing selected BroadVision’s e-business platform to power myboeingfleet. com for a number of reasons including tailored content, ease of installation, scalability and robustness.
One of the most powerful features of myboeingfleet.com is the portal’s ability to personalize content based on the airline and user. In the future, Boeing intends to add personalization at the role level—maintenance engineer, pilot, mechanic, and buyer. The site’s My Profile application, driven by BroadVision One-To-One Enterprise, One-To-One Knowledge, and BroadVision One-To-One Tools, allows users to specify access to documents and information related to their professional responsibilities.For instance, an engineer at American Airlines can ask to be notified when new service bulletins are published for specific models of airplanes, or sections of airplanes.
The site will then automatically generate those notices on the user’s personalized Web page, along with any related information, each time he logs on.Installation of myboeingfleet.com was very smooth, and the portal went live in 134 days. BroadVision’s open architecture made integration with an Oracle database, Sun Microsystems servers, and backend legacy systems a snap.The BroadVision solution is robust and it can handle a high volume of traffic.
This will become particularly important when myboeingfleet.com serves up over 1.5 terabytes of content on the Web to thousands of customer users.
