In the 21st century, most pundits agree that customer loyalty is dead. Customers are demanding specialized products and services in addition to rock-bottom pricing -- and their business goes to anyone who can meet their needs at the moment.

For manufacturers, many of which have never gotten the hang of serving end customers, these are not welcome developments. "Manufacturers ... preferred to have the channel deal with their customers. It's too expensive to have a direct sales force or customer service organization," says John Moore, the former vice president and general manager at ARC Advisory Group. "But, these days you have to find ways to be more responsive to customer needs; it's the only way you can compete."

Rexam PLC (London), the world's largest aluminum can maker, has proven that, though rare, customer loyalty isn't altogether dead. The $5.5 billion company has rolled out portals that let customers not just order and track products, but also share forecasts and view live production data that can tell them, for example, about the availability of products. That customer focus enabled Rexam to win Managing Automation's 2005 Progressive Manufacturer Customer Mastery Award.

In 2001, when Rexam launched its customer centric portals, it was a breakthrough idea in the packaging industry, where most companies were still placing and taking orders by fax, e-mail and telephone. Paul Martin, group director of information management, decided Rexam would help lead its customers into the e-business age. "We wanted to give our customers a new way to interact with us," Martin says. So he got on the road to meet with Rexam's North American beverage can customers, which are among the largest companies in the world, including the Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

Taking Price Out of the Equation

"Our customers are multi-billion dollar companies. I ... talked about the value of what we were doing," says Martin. "We were doing this to strengthen and enhance our relationship with customers. Our competitors can make just as good of a product as we can, and they may try to undercut us on cost." With such a humble product, Martin wanted to change the rules of operating in a commodity market. If he could add real value to customers' operations, he figured, they would be much less likely to jump to a competitor on the basis of price.

"We wanted to take price out of the equation and supply such a compelling experience," says Martin. Rexam would also benefit, of course, by cutting inefficiencies, speeding payments and decreasing manual processing.

The customer centric push came as part of a larger Rexam effort to e-enable its business processes by implementing several different SAP America (Walldorf, Germany) systems throughout its offices and 97 plants in 22 countries worldwide. Rexam's Beverage Can Americas (Chicago) unit decided its customers could benefit from getting in on the action.

In the true spirit of customer service, Martin allowed the company's customers to choose from three options to connect with Rexam: ERP-to-ERP connection, connecting via a portal or connecting via electronic data interchange (EDI). The first alternative, the machine-to-machine connection, was the most automated alternative -- orders would not need to be reentered and would flow automatically between Rexam and customer ERP systems -- and the one that both Rexam and its customers would benefit most from, Martin believed. This integration would be accomplished through a variety of enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies. But many customers were in the throes of ERP rollouts themselves in 2001, and they hesitated to get involved in anything that would require more integration work.

Most chose the second option, which was to connect via customized portals based on SAP's NetWeaver offering, specifically the Enterprise Portal product. The order data flows directly into Rexam's SAP R/3 modules.