Lower employee support costs: a portal lowers the costs of delivering information and services to broad audiences of employees, and supports collaboration between people in different parts of the business. Ford attributes millions in increased productivity by bringing together information employees really needed in the portal. FirstEnergy plans to eliminate millions from its training budget for HR self-service by delivering the key HR functions in a portal that is already widely used.

Increase return on assets: a portal increases the return on systems that have previously been limited to data entry clerks and highly trained analysts, and the entire organization benefits. Eli Lilly’s CIO estimates that the company will save billions over the next decade by allowing scientists to search its molecule library application from the portal.