Dow Looks To EDS To Help Manage Acquired AssetsDow Looks To EDS To Help Manage Acquired Assets

Dow Chemical Co. is turning to EDS to help it simplify the integration of IT assets from recently acquired business units of Rohm and Haas Co. and Celotex Corp.

Dow, in Midland, Mich., said last week it's expanding its seven-year, $1.4 billion outsourcing contract with EDS to provide employees from the two acquisitions with access to DowNet, a global network EDS began building in 2000. The network gives Dow employees worldwide access to common business processes, applications, and data.

The integration project will give all of the new sales employees access to Dow's SAP R/3 sales-ordering system. This should avoid data-integration problems and the need to rekey sales information entered from the field, says Ray Warmbier, DowNet's program office manager. All Dow salespeople use the SAP system for a consistent view of customer data.

The outsourcing relationship with EDS is helping the $23 billion-a-year maker of chemicals, plastics, and agricultural products realize its rapid expansion plans through acquisition, Dow officials say. The company acquired Celotex's foam-insulation business in July and Rohm and Haas' agricultural-products business in June.

DowNet makes use of the EDS Intelligent Network Foundation, a service that draws on expertise and products from third parties such as Cisco Systems and WorldCom to create converged voice, video, and data networks. The Intelligent Network Foundation also uses Multiprotocol Label Switching and quality-of-service technologies to prioritize data flowing over the network, a capability that keeps converged networks from being slowed by jobs that are of lesser importance and use too many system resources.

David Tapper, a senior analyst at International Data Corp., says the integrated network service should let Dow take advantage of unified messaging and voice-over-IP capabilities.