1989 - Lotus Automation founded. Initial services include: switchgear & equipment manufacturing, maintenance & an industrial calibration service.

1993 - Lotus wins first major technical services contract with a US Fortune 500 company. Offerings now include operations, maintenance & technical training.

1996 - Increased business drives move to larger premises. Lotus now employs over 60 technical staff. Technical field services division established.

1999 - Expansion into the UK. Win first international technical services contract. Systems Integration division unveiled.

2000 - USA. First technical services contract and the beginning of one of Lotus’s most vital markets.

2001- Service engineering office opens in Massachusetts.

2002 - Continue to shape company to meet the needs of clients, providing quality, cost effective services and products.

2.3 Market Background

Lotus Automation’s major channel to market is customer referral, as mentioned above. This underlines the importance of the quality of the people they send out to client sites. It is vital that Lotus ensure that they have enough suitably qualified resource to staff client engagements if they are to maintain high levels of quality service and, consequently, ensure continuing customer referrals.

In addition to referrals they also rely upon the targeting of specific companies with cold calls to try and develop new business. The web site is also a means of promoting their services and attracting new business. Lotus has concluded, however, that they are unlikely to ever offer a transactional capability through their web site. Their business is specialised and requires too much customisation to consider going down the e-commerce route. Faceto- face interaction is likely to always be necessary.

Lotus is confident that competition is minimal or not present at all in the domestic Irish marketplace as no other company can match their capabilities. However, on the international scene they have to compete with a number of large contractors, including:

• Honeywell
• Mercury Engineering
• Eastern Electrical Limited (EEL)

Key to Lotus’s success has been their ability to respond with speed and flexibility to a range of customer requests. This underlines the need for their internal business model to be optimised to ensure ongoing speed and flexibility as the company continues to grow. This is a significant part of the raison d’etre for the eBusiness initiative. When asked what were the significant challenges that had to be met to ensure Lotus’s continuing growth and success the management team named the following factors:

• Continuing availability of resource
• Quality of people
• Training strategy and standards

The next section looks at the nature of the problem that gave rise to the need for the eBusiness implementation and also at the specific project objectives.