The Business Problem

Market pressures are continually forcing organizations toward greater efficiency and productivity. Controlling costs is only one part of this equation. Increasing the quality of products and services is another and this requires a continued commitment to developing innovative ways of doing business with partners and customers.

The IGLOO Software Solution

IGLOO provides all of the tools you need to create, sustain and manage a global partner trading community where the borders and barriers between partners and suppliers are replaced by virtual teams, improved operational efficiency and increased profits.

Delivered on a SaaS (software as a service) model, IGLOO can inexpensively and seamlessly extend your
organization’s reach directly into the business operations of customers, partners and suppliers. IGLOO makes it possible to quickly involve partners and suppliers in your development or value chain, without costly upgrades to existing systems.

Manage Talent and Expertise

A partner community gives everyone in your organization increased access to expertise, information and resources.

Find the best person for the job. Within an IGLOO partner community, every person can create and update their own professional profile, outlining specific knowledge, skills and expertise related to their work. This vital information is accessible through a private LinkedIn-like social directory–making experts easy to locate, contact and add to a peer list.

Personal profiles of all registered network members are displayed and can be sorted and filtered in the Member Directory. Managers can use the directory to connect members across departments, teams and geographies to maximize existing resources and view a snapshot of each member’s most recent contributions.

Manage Your Knowledge and Business Relationships

Use a partner community to aggregate the information your partners need to work with you to develop new products and services. All information within your partner community can be searched, bookmarked, commented on, tagged, edited and subscribed to (email or RSS) by any authorized person. This allows your partners to be “in the know” when relevant information, such as requirements, RFPs, product specifications or suppliers, change. Your partners are guaranteed immediate and secure access to the most up-to-the-minute information and peoplet hey need to help them do their jobs.

Involving your partners in an online community improves communications by presenting various ways to pull information from and push information to stakeholders.

• Blogs and Forums are highly effective communications tools to promote information exchange within your partner community. Partners can be encouraged to create their own blog on a specific topic and solicit opinions from other bloggers within your organization—a great way to share ideas, ignite innovation and deepen relationships with your partners. By sharing experience and receiving information in a less structured way, people quickly come to realize how much faster they are able to solicit opinions and accelerate the pace of innovation.
  
• Use Notifications and Announcements to automatically post the latest-breaking information across your social corporate network. Once posted, this information is indexed and fully searchable.
  
• A partner Wiki—a collection of web pages that partners can access, contribute to and modify online—can be set up as a "living" document that always contains the most recent project-related information.  Your partners can use wikis to actively contribute to the development and refinement of your product and service offerings. 
  
• Relevant Links can be added to the community, such as links to supplier sites, competitors, communities of practice, and more.
  
• By integrating partners and suppliers into workgroups and discussions, your organization can draw on the ideas, insights, domain expertise and processes of your partners.

IGLOO accommodates every type of project, from processes like Requests for Proposals (RFP's) to short term events such as joint marketing efforts with partners outside of the firewall. Project teams can be created on the fly, participant roles defined and any relevant information stored in a central and secure partner community. Members are easily linked to relevant documents, URLs, blogs, forums, etc. External organizations, such as supplier companies, can access requirements posted online, for example, and bid on them—making your online partner community a hub of efficiency in your organization.

As projects are established, specialists such as engineers in the construction industry, for example, can communicate and share documents with co-workers and partners from the work site via the partner community. A trading community allows employees, partners, customers and suppliers to use familiar Web 2.0 tools to easily collaborate, reducing the time it takes to create proposals, for example, by replicating best practices online.

IGLOO delivers a secure platform with standard security features like SSL, role-based security and audit trail. Members of your organization can log into the system and begin collaborating with external partners and suppliers without having to worry about the integrity or security of their data.