Owens Corning cozies up to customers

The company that invented glass fiber insulation does not want to insulate itself from its customers. That’s why Owens Corning recently deployed a new enterprise decision portal that it believes will improve its contact with customers at every touch point.

The $5 billion global manufacturer of advanced glass and building material systems has implemented the Freedom portal from Infoimage to give customers greater access to information and to streamline customer inquiry cycle times.

“Customer satisfaction is one of Owens Corning’s core values,” says Steve Zerby, e-business strategist with the company. “To help us understand our customers even better and more efficiently anticipate their needs, we chose the Freedom portal. We believe that it provides us with an important foundation that will enable us not only to meet, but to exceed our customers’ expectations.”

The portal helps people work more efficiently and make better, faster decisions by consolidating relevant information from disparate data sources, according to InfoImage. Those information sources--which include corporate databases, enterprise resource planning systems, e-mail, calendaring and the Web--are unified into a single desktop view that enables collaboration among work partners across an enterprise.

Implementation of the portal began Jan. 15 and includes both intranet and extranet users at Owens Corning. The company has more than 20,000 employees around the world, and has manufacturing, sales and research facilities in 30 countries on six continents.