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"They have access to weekly and monthly data on what we plan to produce," says CIO and senior VP Perry Lipe. "That information is extremely key to them. It's one reason why our plants are on schedule and able to meet production forecasts." In addition to helping the just-in-time manufacturing model succeed, making data available to suppliers takes excess inventory out of the supply chain and reduces costs, Lipe says.

ArvinMeritor's system includes an Oracle data warehouse and uses Information Builders Inc.'s WebFocus business-intelligence software and iWay Software interconnectivity tools.

T. Rowe Price, the financial-services firm, competes for 401(k) retirement funds by granting plan administrators access to data about employee participation. Six years ago it began making a handful of reports available to 50 plan administrators. It now has 1,500 users of its Client Access Reporting System who view dozens of reports. But unlike many business-intelligence extranets, the system allows plan administrators to do ad hoc queries. "Mostly they're trying to understand who's using the 401(k) plan, querying by age group or location," says Kip Barkley, BI project leader.

Building such extranets has become easier with the adoption of Web services and the reorganization of business-intelligence software into modules that can be activated as Web services, an ongoing process among major product vendors, Forrester's Gile says.

Extending business intelligence to outside users isn't without pitfalls. IT managers face a host of data-security issues, including how to define prospective user groups and grant access to users.

With most extranets, users log on with an ID and password first to the network, then to specific tools or applications. Some companies such as Supersol create additional layers by requiring that users log on with a token that uniquely identifies them and use a VPN, which ensures that only encrypted data is moving over the public network.

T. Rowe Price uses IBM Tivoli Access Manager and Business Objects SA's security module to manage access to retirement-plan data. "We make sure the users are who they say they are and limit them to their own data," Barkley says. Only users who are logged on can view reports, and they can't republish them through the system to others.

Penske Logistics LLC, which manages the movement of supplies and manufactured goods for other companies, has taken steps to safeguard the business-intelligence extranet it uses to provide supplier-performance reports to its clients. Penske gives customers user IDs and passwords and uses Business Objects Supervisor to impose privileges and restrictions. Exchanges between the Penske system and extranet users are encrypted using 128-bit encryption. Extranet users can only see data that pertains to them, says Tom Nather, senior systems analyst.

Penske also discovered that things can get lost in translation. While Penske workers understand the rules and terminology used to prepare reports, that same terminology can be indecipherable to outside users. A supplier with a reputation for quality products, for example, might show up on a report as a poor performer because its trucking firm was habitually late. Such reports generated lots of calls to Penske's help desk asking how the performance ratings were calculated.

Penske report developers solved the problem by adding a reference guide to the terms and metrics used in arriving at performance ratings. Customers got more intelligence out of the reports and Penske experienced a 25% to 30% reduction in help-desk calls, Nather says. Business Objects, which supplied the WebIntelligence software the Penske extranet is built on, recently added a "BI encyclopedia" to its product for defining business and technical terms in reports.

Back in Texas, the Department of Transportation is planning to make the Crash Records Information System available to the public and insurance company representatives who want copies of accident reports, says Catherine Cioffi, Crash Records Information System project manager. The extranet also will be used to alert local law-enforcement agencies where speeding and drunken-driving offenses occur with greater frequency. Business-intelligence extranets, says deputy director for traffic operations Rawson, "help us all do our jobs better."

Illustration by Campbell Laird/Veer