Carboline Protective Coatings & Linings

Project: Corporate Intranet, Extranet, Portal for Sales Reps, Employees, Distributors

Overview: Carboline Company is a world-wide leading supplier of corrosion resistant products specializing in high performance coatings, linings, and fireproofing. Carboline needed much more than just a web site, they needed a secure portal for their sales force, employees, and distributors to publish and access tools to help them sell more and better serve their customers.

DCG Solution: DCG worked with Carboline to identify the various users who needed access to the portal and what their permissions should be. The portal contains an administration console that allows site owners to control all content and access. Each user's experience, upon logging into the portal, is unique because the menu and content displayed is all dynamic and based on the user's role(s).

Users are able to submit case histories for review and publishing onto the site. Users can easily search the case history library based on a number of criteria such as market, product(s), state, etc. Users can also select the format of the results (snapshot, list that is exportable to excel, photos only). The case history library allows sales reps to easily locate jobs where Carboline products have been used where the job characteristics are similar to an new opportunity. Reps can then demonstrate the experience Carboline has with projects that are similar to the opportunity at hand.

Users can easily lookup a product by typing either a product term or number. An Ajax type-ahead feature brings up a list of products as the user is keying in the word. The user simply clicks on a product name and is brought to a page containing ALL information regarding that product. Product information includes product description, selling advantages, applicable markets, physical characteristics, application characteristics, links to news, MSDS and product data sheets, technical bulletins, product change notices, case histories and more!

Users can submit a number of requests online which are then routed to appropriate users and worked through to completion using various workflow processes. Examples include literature order requests, technical service requests, and sample requests.

Carboline's portal has many more features and functionality. This portal is the source of all product news, data, and tools used by people of various roles to share information, service customers, and sell products!