The Morgan Crucible Company PLC - www.morgancrucible.com
The Morgan Crucible Company PLC is one of the world's leading specialist engineering companies. The Group operates globally in four product sectors - electrical carbon, engineered carbon, technical ceramics and insulating ceramics.
The company has 9,500 employees with operations in 40 countries worldwide.
The Project:
In line with most World-class companies in the current marketplace, The Morgan Group is constantly reviewing their costs and overheads. The initial project grew from the need to share detailed plans and drawings on their "fuel cell" technologies with internal and external bodies, safely and securely. With quite large files being generated on a regular basis, it was difficult to exchange and track different versions of data with a wide range of different people across worldwide geographies, in a timely and inexpensive manner being mindful of changing versions and design concepts.
No ordinary global Intranet/Extranet could provide a solution to address these issues without considerable cost and administrative overhead. The Morgan Group needed a tried and tested solution to produce the exchange of information required, in real time, without the costly administrative overheads and network constraints that would enable anybody, with the correct access and authorities, to access the data from any Internet enabled device, safely and securely.
Common issues faced by The Morgan Group when looking at Intranets/Extranets and global networking:
- Information systems are not coordinated.
- There was no authoritative, centralized controlling entity and no desire to establish one.
- There was very little interaction across the four business entities other than from the small Head Office.
- There was no consistent policy on information visibility.
- There was no consistent policy on data security across the business entities.
The Solution
To initially combat the problem of providing an Intranet / Extranet solution that could offer the functionality required by the Morgan Group - Saybi's partners Suntail devised an entire product range from the ground up, to function in a distributed, networked business environment. This is "OpenFabric".
The OpenFabric solution provided The Morgan Group with a framework that has been purpose built for creating secure, scalable, distributed data. The OpenFabric product suite consists of a development environment and a server platform that will shortly be totally integrated with their recent introduction of Microsoft's Active Directory enabling seamless registration of Morgan employees using the same password authority.
This application is designed to enable the secure sharing and management of distributed content including but not limited to; documents, images, xml based services, multimedia and CAD drawings. It will also be possible for Morgan users to create and share their own dynamic web documents using the 'xDesigner' from Suntail's proprietary product, OpenFabric, when they are ready to utilise this option.
The biggest benefit of using OpenFabric is that the end user can manage it easily. Many IT departments are full of IT personnel spending hours updating content and redesigning Intranets/Extranets on behalf of other business functions. This creates an unnecessary dependency on the IT function - hence so many Intranets fail! Using OpenFabric gives the responsibility of change and updates back to the end user - so both time and resource is saved.
Chris Armstrong, CTO at Morgan Crucible, says "OpenFabric is interesting to us because it allows the intelligent exchange of information globally and in real time, without the dependency on IT personnel. The OpenFabric product will help streamline our business processes, not only internally, but also at the customer interface."
The Outcome of the Project
The project was a success for The Morgan Group. The Openfabric customized framework supplied the functionality to enable personnel to securely communicate original and up to date documents with staff, customers and suppliers. This has led to The Morgan Group leading the way in their respective markets for information transfer, facilitating quick and effective documentation on financial results and policies. Concurrent with this development, cost savings have also been achieved through the implementation of an integrated IP (Internet Protocol) network that enables personnel both internally and externally to access the OpenFabric server from any Internet enabled computing device, safely and securely using the Web.