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The growing integration of computer technology at work and home has been instrumental to the explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet had approximately 50 million users in 1997 and is estimated to grow to about 200 million users by year 2002.(1)
Subsequently, the Internet has made a permanent place for itself in the business world. Electronic mail (email) is a common way of distributing memos in companies and many companies, big and small, now have Web sites.
A recent mill manager’s report(3) indicates that the most important technology advancement in the paper industry in the last five years is the use of computer-based technology and information systems. This same survey indicates that the Internet continues to grow as a source of communication and information among mill managers. Ninety-one percent report having access to the Internet, nearly double of what it was just four years ago. Of those with access, 79% indicated that they use the Internet for various business-related activities. This indicates that the access and use of the Internet even at the mill floor level is fast increasing.
Just like the paper manufacturers, the customers of the paper industry also seem to catch on very fast with the Web. For example, in the printing industry, 80% have access to the Internet and 40% currently have a Web site. The graphic arts firms who have Web sites use them most frequently for online file submissions (61%), online job submissions (45%) and on-line job estimates (35%).(4)
Given the ever-increasing access, we now examine the paper industry’s presence on the Web and the types of information and service one can find. In general there are four types of pulp and paper related sites: paper manufacturers, industry suppliers, professional organizations, and educational institutions.
PAPER MANUFACTURERS. Manufacturer sites are generally designed for three purposes: public relations, product information, and contact information. Of these three elements, currently public relations typically forms the majority of the Web sites’ content. Public relations items may include: press releases, statements on the company’s commitment to the environment, history of the company, and possibly even an overview of the paper production process. One site that has excellent public relations content is Mead Corp. (www.mead.com). On its site, Mead presents information about the environment and facts about paper, and includes an illustrated overview of how paper is made.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Appleton Papers Inc.’s Web site (www.appletonpapers.com) contains very little in the way of public relations information, but focuses on product and company information. Note that this does not make one site better than the other one, just that each company has selected a different audience and approach to its Web site.
Finally, the contact information section of a manufacturer’s Web site may contain an email and mailing address for general questions, or it may contain several different addresses for different departments, such as sales or human resources. Sometimes there may not be a contact information section, although this is something that should be included on any Web site to allow for feedback from site visitors.
The total number of manufacturing sites on the Web is hard to estimate, but the pulp and paper and paper products companies listing on Yahoo! listed 44 companies while the U.S. pulp and paper companies list on pponline.com (www.pponline.com) contains 84 sites. pponline.com is the daily online news and information service sponsored by the Pulp & Paper news and information group. The site pponline.com provides a list of 23 Canadian and 42 international pulp and paper manufacturers’ sites. An exact count of existing manufacturing web sites is not possible, because some companies may not be listed in either of these sources and new sites are always being added.
In addition to public relations, product information and contact information mentioned earlier, at least one manufacturer’s site provides customer service and support online. Champion International Corp. has launched the industry’s first Internet-based Paper Stock Inventory Program with WebExpress Online. In response to a customer survey that indicated a significant need for real-time information on product availability and price, Champion’s WebExpress Online enables customers to select any combination of grade category, basis weight, roll width, or warehouse location, and find out the availability for any of Champion’s coated free-sheet stock grades. Jerry Faust, Coated Free-sheet Product Manager, added, “By providing real-time information on stock availability, WebExpress Online enables customers to respond more quickly to job quote requests and, ultimately, get the job done faster.” More information about Champion and this program can be obtained at www.championpaper.com.
Continuing on customer service and support, Bowater Inc.’s (formerly Avenor Inc.) Customer Data Center is an excellent example illustrating the value of a Web site in marketing newsprint and market pulp (www.bowater.com). The site provides three types of customer service online: order tracking, quality control and accounting. The order tracking feature allows the customer to access complete order description i.e. grade, basis weight, roll size, rolls ordered, produced and shipped along with shipping information. There is also roll data available on any single roll of newsprint. Access is also provided to billing data through a copy of the invoice.
Several non-manufacturer sites have also been developed to buy and sell paper. PaperExchange.com LLC (www.paperexchange.com) is an Internet marketplace for paper buyers, sellers, and traders, providing a global market in all grades of paper. Transactions are done online via a secure server with a small fee paid to PaperExchange.com. A membership is required to complete transactions and the identity of all members is kept confidential.
A second trading site is The Paper Site (www.papersite.com), an interactive, searchable “trading floor” that allows one to offer, purchase and inquire about inventories in the paper industry. Transactions are done directly between buyer and seller, with no transaction fee payable to The Paper Site.
Industry suppliers. In contrast to paper manufacturers, a supplier’s Web site will mostly focus on product information and contact information, with little if any emphasis placed on public relations. The product information will usually include pictures and a detailed description of the product. The contact information will usually be limited to regional sales offices, but occasionally may include contact information for technical assistance.
A good example of a suppliers’ Web site is Voith Sulzer’s site at www.voithsulzer.com. For a very extensive listing of suppliers, pponline.com gives a list of more than 120 suppliers to the pulp and paper industry. Most of the sites on the list have a comprehensive Web page, or at least an email address along with traditional contact information.
One of the supplier sites that provides online customer service and support is that of Babcock & Wilcox (www.babcock.com). Babcock & Wilcox is the first company in the power and steam generation industry to offer a formalized process for Web-facilitated commercial transactions, allowing customers to submit orders for parts through the Web. The Web site provides an interactive, 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week means for customers and potential customers around the world to request a quote, place an order or send a general comment or inquiry. Greg Tomei, Marketing Communications Project Supervisor, notes, “We have seen a definite increase in Web usage by our customers and are receiving an increasing number of orders, inquiries and requests for quotes each month. As the needs of our customers evolve, we continue to implement a number of automated enhancements to become more efficient in serving them.”
Professional Organizations. Most of the major professional organizations have their own Web site, including the American Forest and Paper Association (www.afandpa.org), the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI) (www.tappi.org) and Paper Industry Management Association (PIMA) (PIMA-online.org). Typical elements of these sites include a membership directory, information on how to join, current news, and a listing of upcoming events. These sites may have additional information on employment opportunities and links to other Web sites of interest.
Educational Institutions. University Web sites vary widely in their appearance and usefulness, depending on the wishes of the individual schools and the abilities of their Web designers. Some schools wish to use their Web sites as recruitment tools and emphasize the facilities and programs available at their specific locations. Others may want to showcase their research capabilities, and list the description of several projects they have done or are currently pursuing. While most businesses will use a professional design company to build their Web site, schools may employ one of their students to maintain their presence on the Web. This means that the quality of the individual school’s Web sites varies greatly, and the content may either be out of date or changing every day.
Educational institutions are also beginning to use the Web along with today’s information technologies such as the interactive television and email to provide distance learning and continuing education opportunities.(5) In the University of Minnesota Department of Wood and Paper Science, we have been offering an introductory level course on Pulp and Paper Technology (WPS 5305) via interactive television over the past three years. This 2-credit course is offered at multiple remote locations close to a number of paper mills in the state of Minnesota. People from various parts of the mill ranging from accounting to maintenance to engineering go to their training center or a nearby community college and attend the classes two hours per week.
The course is taught like a normal college class except that the instructor is at the university and the students (mill employees) are at their respective sites. In addition to the Web, email is used as a means of increasing personal interaction between the instructor and students. We have observed a substantial change in the availability and student proficiency in the use of computers and the Web over the last three years the course has been offered. During the first year, very few students had access to the Web or email and those with access did so primarily via home computers. Today, mill employees have routine access directly at the mill. A large number of students choose these electronic means to communicate follow-up questions or to submit homework assignments. Course evaluation results and surveys indicate that the Web is a very viable means of offering continuing education. Given this trend, continuing education “on-demand” will be easily available in the future at the mills’ doors for all of the mills’ employees.
Summary. As can be seen, the pulp and paper industry has a very active presence on the Web. A question that may have occurred to you is, why? For the pulp and paper producers, it gives them a chance to reach the general public much less expensively than taking out advertisements in several different places. It gives them a chance to answer questions the public may have about the environmental impacts of a paper mill and to educate the public about commonly held misconceptions. An excellent example of this is the Procter & Gamble Web site (www.pg.com), where the company devoted a large section to explaining the origin of the P&G company logo and how it is not a Satanic emblem.
In addition to public relations, the Web provides an excellent opportunity for manufacturers and suppliers alike to showcase their products and services. For the suppliers, professional organizations, and universities, the Web allows them to reach a broader audience and is a supplemental form of advertising.
The World Wide Web is emerging as a new way to do business. It is a way to get the information efficiently to customers and help them complete their jobs in the most cost- and time-effective manner. As costs for development and maintenance of a Web site continue to fall and the benefits of having a site become more apparent, more and more of the pulp and paper industry will make a mark on the Web. *
References
1. Vlosky, R.P., and Fontenot, R. “The Internet and the Forest Products Industry: Current Status and Projected Trends,” Forest Products Journal 47 (11/12): 33-40 (1997).
2. Kroll, E. “The Whole Internet Users Guide and Catalog,” 2nd Edition O’Reilly and Associates Inc., Sebastopol, Calif. (1994).
3. Shaw, M. “Mill Managers Report Mixed Views on the Direction of Paper Industry,” Pulp & Paper, 71(12): 55-63 (1998).
4. Black, G. S. “Printers and the Internet,” Graphic Arts Marketing Information Service (GAMIS) Study, June 1998.
5. Massey, J.G., Bowyer, J.L., Bratkovich, S.M. “Distance Learning: New Opportunities Abound,” Forest Products Journal 47 (7/8): 20-26 (1997).
Shri Ramaswamy, and Ulrike Tschirner are with the Paper Science and Engineering program in the Dept. of Wood and Paper Science at the University of Minnesota; Sam Nichol works for National Starch and Chemical Co., Appleton, Wis.
| Understanding the Web: Did you know…? |
| While many people send and receive email and browse Web sites for business and pleasure, many do not have a complete understanding of common terminology associated with the Internet and the World Wide Web.
For starters, aren’t the terms Internet and World Wide Web just different words for the same thing? No, the Internet is a global network of smaller networks and individual computers while the World Wide Web is a type of traffic on this network. The term Internet actually refers to the collection of computers and the components that connect them, and can trace its origins back to the1960s.(2) In its early years, the Internet was mostly used for file transfers between users, with e-mail and various other types of information exchange making up the balance of Internet traffic.
In 1989, the concept of the Web was conceived by Timothy Berns-Lee, and it was 1993 before it caught on with the public at large. In June 1993, there were 130 Web sites online. By December of that year, the number had grown to 623 and had reached an estimated 650,000 sites by the beginning of 1997. This phenomenal growth is due to both new private and new commercial sites. In fact, it is now estimated that as many as 60% of the Web sites today are commercial one.(1).
Who or what is URL, a commonly encountered term when talking about the Web? URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is essentially an address for a Web page. Typically the URL will consist of two parts, the domain name and file information. The domain name identifies on what computer the information is located, and the file information tells this computer what specific file you are interested in viewing. For instance, the URL for the Wood and Paper Science Department at the University of Minnesota is www.cnr.umn.edu/WPS/WPS.html. The domain name is www.cnr.umn.edu, and identifies the computer as the World Wide Web (www) server of the College of Natural Resources (cnr) at the University of Minnesota (umn.edu). Once this computer is contacted, it looks in the WPS directory for the file named WPS.html. It is important to note that URL’s are case specific, so if you typed the above in all capital letters, you would probably receive a notification that the file you are looking for does not exist.
A common question is “How do I find…?” on the Web. The most common method of finding a Web page is to use a search engine. Search engines are Web sites that have cataloged a large percentage of the existing Web sites. Information can be found on these sites by two methods. The first is to look for the topic you want under a category heading, such as sports or science. These categories will usually be further divided into more and more specific subtopics. The second method is to do a key word search of the search engines database.
For instance, if you were interested in finding a site dealing with antique cars, you could tell the search engine to find Web pages with the words antique and automobile. Any Web page in the search engines database with either of the words antique or automobile will be returned, and pages with the most number of matches will be listed first.
The key to getting good results with a search engine is to make the key words specific enough to limit the number of pages returned, but not so limiting that some relevant pages might be missed. Some examples of search engines can be found at www.webcrawler.com and www.yahoo.com, just to name two of the many search engines available. Most search engines are free of charge and are financed by small advertisements on each page.
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| Internet company stocks are receiving enormous favorable attention lately. Several spectacular initial public offerings seem to exaggerate the value of this new, Internet industry. But even if share prices are overvalued, Web-based information is now a value-added commodity. Many investors have bought stock in the Internet, but more users have taken a stake in it.
For the publishers of this magazine, the Web has fast opened up new avenues of providing news and information services, marketing products, and increasing readership and revenues. For editors, the Internet has dramatically sped up the flow of news and information and fundamentally affected how it is dispersed.
The company that publishes this magazine, Miller Freeman Inc., is a true believer in the Web. Now one of the world’s largest trade publishers, MFI for most of its long history was a publisher of the printed page. Most of its business now is to organize trade shows and maintain Web sites.
MFI publishes 94 magazines and 15 newsletters, and holds 127 trade shows and conferences across a wide variety of trades and industries. The company has grown fast into high-tech magazines and computer industry trade shows. Of course they all have related Web sites.
Other titles in the MFI portfolio range from Kitchen, Bed, & Bath, to Sporting Goods News, Guitar Player to Diagnostic Imaging. They, as well, all have Web sites. MFI in early 1999 maintains about 96 Web sites in total, officially outnumbering its magazines.
Many of the Web sites are free online versions of the magazines and trade shows. For publishers, an online presence, even if it is free and not generating additional revenue, is critical to the perception and potential of printed publications.
The publishers of Pulp & Paper and Pulp & Paper International launched their joint-venture Web site, pponline.com, in October 1996.
The initial goal was to offer the magazines online and to deliver fast-moving news and information that was outpacing the premier, weekly newsletters, Pulp & Paper Week and PPI This Week.
The pponline.com site attracted several thousand registrants in its first year. That number was very small compared with the magazine’s circulation, but already rivaled the circulation of Pulp & Paper Week. This revealed a community of readers for the Web site, and in late 1997, pponline.com expanded and converted to a paid registration Web site.
Almost 18 months later, it has grown back to a substantial number of paid subscribers. The site offers daily pulp and paper industry and business news, online monthly magazines, research archives of the Pulp & Paper group’s weekly and monthly industry newsletters, current industry statistics, and a popular daily email service.
New features and content are developed regularly, taking advantage of the worldwide reach of the Pulp & Paper and Pulp & Paper International editors and staff. News and market coverage is provided from editorial offices in Brussels, Singapore, New York, and San Francisco. The site’s News Center provides links to stock prices, product pricing, and futures prices.
The Research Area includes newsletter and magazine archives and an extensive area and database of quarterly company financial reports. Import and export data and production statistics are also provided.
The Networking Area of pponline.com includes an extensive list of industry links, providing an excellent source to tour the Web sites of more than 145 global pulp and paper companies. The area also includes a calendar of industry events, and a searchable word Buyers Guide with more than 3,400 company listings.
The pponline.com News Center is updated daily. The site provides a one-month free trial for interested subscribers.
—By James McLaren
Editor, www.pponline.com
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