At Utility Service Co., whose primary business is maintaining water tanks and related assets for municipalities across the U.S., a self-service portal initiative has significantly improved the company's ability to compete, says IT manager David Al-Khazraji. The Perry, Ga.-based firm is using Oracle's E-Business Suite in a hosted model, though it runs the Oracle Portal front end in-house. Customers use the portal, which went live in early 2005, to check billing information, log and track field-service requests, and download material from a document-sharing repository.

Though the implementation of the suite of products -- which also includes financials, manufacturing resource planning and service-delivery applications -- and the associated legacy-data migration was difficult, Al-Khazraji says the effort has paid off.

"It's such a complex architecture that our legacy data wasn't even enough to create a single record in Oracle. We initially had to create a lot of default values to pass to Oracle and work on them afterward," Al-Khazraji says. But Oracle has allowed Utility Service to tie all of a customer's interactions with the company to a single customer ID and eliminated manual indexing. "Someone just types in a customer ID, and it's already indexed 90 different ways," he says.

Customer surveys reveal a service satisfaction rate of 92 percent for 2006. Moreover, complaints about service have dropped 40 percent over the past two years, according to Al-Khazraji.

"Our portal has greatly enhanced our ability to compete, especially in getting large contracts," he says. "Our customers can manage their interactions with us and see what our customer service reps see. We recently closed one of the biggest deals in our history because of the transparency we are able to provide through our portal."