Porterhouse Limited

4 . Decisions made and Rationale

Within an overall strategy to drive up turnover and develop markets, Porterhouse briefed its potential web design partners to operate within the following requirements and constraints:

• Porterhouse wanted a reliable website that would be easy to maintain and update in-house.
• The product range should be portrayed in such a way that the image of high quality and design was reinforced.
• The company decided to place just one part of its product range on the website to begin with.
• For this eBusiness initiative, the objective was to try to get Porterhouse’s existing outlets to communicate more over the Internet . The initiative was not to be targeted at the general public.
• The company decided to implement a customer-ordering system. This would not include paying online or online order tracking which would be difficult to implement with its MRP (Manufacturing Requirements Planning) system. The customer-ordering system should work well and it should be clear to the customer what has been ordered.

The vendor selection process:

Porterhouse looked at two different web design companies – Trasna in Navan and QBIKS Internet Architects in Newry. It had a personal contact in QBIKS (now called Climate) and, one week after the initial meeting, QBIKS made a very impressive presentation incorporating storyboards for the web design. One of the directors of QBIKS had a strong design background and was conversant in the language of the textile industry, as he had worked with a clothing retail chain. QBIKS understood that quality was of huge importance to Porterhouse and the storyboards illustrated that.

The other company was good on the non-specific aspects of web design but indicated that the rest of the project work would be up to Porterhouse to do themselves i.e. organise the photo shoot, find a studio, hire the models etc. This would have been very time-consuming for Porterhouse so it needed a company that would take on not only the site architecture but also the image and the brand. As a further sign of its flexibility, QBIKS also offered reasonable rates to complete the Enterprise Ireland feasibility study for Porterhouse. For all of the reasons above,

QBIKS was chosen as Porterhouse’s web design partner.

QBIKS worked on all aspects of the site architecture, content management, brand image and the photo shoot. It secured a model and a studio. It also assisted in training, putting together a customised training course in the areas of:

• How to scan photos
• How to update the website e.g. how to change a user. QBIKS provided a customised manual on CD-ROM containing detailed information on each aspect of using and updating the website.

QBIKS charged IRP50k for the site, at a rate of IRP500 per day over 84 days.

Porterhouse had to make some compromises to achieve the desired eBusiness solution within budget and sacrificed
certain areas of functionality including:

• The system was limited to 25 users per country/region of US
• It had to find a workaround solution for lighter-coloured swatches.