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by Lauren Gibbons Paul, Contributing Editor   All kinds of equipment use air filters -- everything from jet engines all the way down to disk drives. No matter the type of product, when that filter is dirty or worn out, the customer has only one priority: get a replacement as fast as possible. And because today's supply chains are much leaner than before, most companies don't hold much inventory. So, when a company needs a replacement filter, it needs information ("Which filter works with my equipment?") along with the filter itself -- pronto. The Internet is a natural delivery mechanism for both the information and the ordering function, eliminating the lag time and money involved in printing and sending product literature through the mail. Donaldson Company Inc. (Minneapolis), a $1.6 billion maker of filtration systems, has 14 business units serving customers of all sizes in a wide range of industries and sells tens of thousands of products. Back in 2001, the company faced the fact that it needed to upgrade its aging, static Web infrastructure. Customers demanded better functionality, and the old system was rapidly becoming unsupportable. [Click to continue] |