The site gets extra credit for using students to help design and run the site, doing its part to prevent the projected 21st century IT worker shortage. IS capabilities to employees worldwide. The effort has achieved the department's goal of attracting new internal business. This site lets energy suppliers bid for buyers based on anonymous online customer profiles that include power-consumption summaries and other information. Customers save on energy costs.
Suppliers save on sales and marketing costs by instant access to qualified buyers.
North American Power, which formerly did matching by hand, saves on personnel costs. This site has added benefits enrollment and online procurement support to a full complement of self-service applications, including online training, orientation and skills databases. Both an extranet and a public Web site, this site provides product and business partner referrals in eight languages. Its content also feeds and updates a CD-ROM catalog that allows power users to search offline. More than 3,500 employees at two Reliance companies use RelNet as a common knowledge repository.