BUSINESS PROCESS Technology Facilitates Collateral Development While Helping Ensure Brand Compliance
A large holding company in the entertainment industry—with 14 separate branded properties—wanted to find a way to improve the management and control of its brand identities. Each of its branded properties had been developing collateral independently, with the net effect of compromised brand integrity cross the board. Working with the direct marketing agency’s technology solutions group, the holding company presented its subsidiary brand properties and their ad agencies with a new software-based tool for developing collateral: a Web-based solution that not only automates and streamlines collateral development, but also produces attractive, compelling collateral that is, most importantly, brand compliant across all the properties. The properties were so enthusiastic about this solution that all 14 brand subsidiaries adopted it faster than mandated. What drives this agency’s winning solution? Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft SQL Server® 2005, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
E-Service Vehicle Registration Certificate Process Cut from 15 Days to Three Days
The Dutch government’s Department of Road Transport (RDW) aims to bring seamless, electronic services to citizens and businesses, and in 2007 won Computable Magazine’s Innovation Award. With the help of Microsoft® Services, the RDW built an electronic services framework using Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. Using this, it developed e-services, which citizens and businesses can access through a Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 portal. Available 24 hours a day, the portal includes an online application facility for replacement vehicle registration certificates. In just four months, 45 per cent of applicants have started to use the e-service, which helps ensure new documents are issued to citizens in just three days instead of 15 days.
Airline Increases Productivity, Enhances Service with Web Content Management
Founded in 1929, Hawaiian Airlines is Hawaii’s largest airline, with 3,500 employees, and having carried 7 million passengers in 2007. While the company’s Web site was highly effective in delivering new services and products to its customers, making changes to the site was a time-intensive process that required IT involvement. To maximize the effectiveness of the Web site and to streamline administration, the company implemented Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for Web content management. Now, the airline’s marketing department can make rapid content updates on its own to deliver a more personalized and powerful customer experience—without IT intervention. As a result, the IT department has experienced an approximate 50 percent increase in general productivity and is better able to focus on strategic, revenue-generating tasks.
Supply Chain Provider Saves $227,000 and 15,600 Labor Hours in Less Than a Year
Yobel Supply Chain Management, based in Lima, Peru, provides customers in Latin America and the United States with supply chain planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics. With growing competition and increased demand for innovation in bringing products to market, Yobel began surveying customers, partners, and employees on their operational efficiency and service. But without a structured process for gathering and using feedback, data entry and analysis were slow and ineffective. Yobel deployed the 2007 Microsoft® Office system to standardize and automate the assessment process. Using this integrated system of programs, Yobel can automatically generate survey forms, aggregate and analyze response data, and dynamically display results using charts and performance indicators. Yobel eliminated tedious manual data work and gained valuable insights that customers can view online.
Tyson Foods Improves Collaboration and Business Insight, Creates Process Efficiencies
Every day, the 15,000 information workers at Tyson Foods share information with one another to develop and market hundreds of products. To speed employee connections, strengthen business insight, and improve efficiency, Tyson deployed Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as its companywide collaboration platform. Using the software’s Enterprise Search capability, employees can find the people and data they need quickly, and employees have created more than 700 personal sites to share skills and experience. Users can access dashboards that expose SAP data through SharePoint sites to aid decision making, as well as business intelligence tools that integrate with Microsoft Office desktop programs for improved insights. In addition, the IT staff has been able to quickly create powerful, new Office Business Applications that are boosting productivity and savings across the company.
Eastman Chemical Employees Engineer Thousands of Process Improvements Using Easy-to-Use Software
As a growing, global Fortune 500 company, Eastman Chemical Company has had to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions and increased competition. The company has long used technology to work more efficiently and squeeze out delays in creating new products and delivering outstanding customer support.
Eastman’s dynamic and collaborative atmosphere was tested when the company found it had stretched its existing collaboration technology to its limits. Exchanging information is critical to getting the right product or service to the right place at the right time. As Eastman began the search for new collaboration tools, it knew that it needed a solution that would be flexible, reliable, and easy to use.
After selecting and rolling out its new enterprise collaboration software, the company was surprised to find that groups all over the company latched onto it to create their own localized collaborative solutions. These grass-roots sites streamlined business processes across the organization, which supported continued growth with lower overhead costs. Using these thousands of collaboration sites, Eastman employees are also delivering better customer service and faster response to rapidly changing market conditions.
Natural Gas Producer Deploys New Intranet Solution, Meets Growth Challenges
Chesapeake Energy, the leading natural-gas producer in the United States, is a rapidly growing company that tripled its employee headcount between 2005 and 2008. To meet the challenges of such rapid growth, the company needed a more powerful intranet solution to boost worker productivity, improve workflow, and enhance collaboration across the oil and gas value chain. Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Chesapeake Energy developed and deployed a new solution that integrates the company’s intranet, extranet, and Internet presence. Through its extensibility, the solution streamlines collaboration across project teams, boosts productivity, simplifies data analysis, and creates the basis for consistent communications. With the business capabilities gained through the new solution, Chesapeake Energy is well positioned for future growth.
Telecom Company Calls on Integrated Collaboration Solution to Optimize Productivity
Irish telecommunications company eircom has recently moved to its new corporate headquarters in Dublin. The prospect of a state-of-the-art, modern work environment encouraged management to think about helping information workers move away from the manual, paper-based processes and face-to-face meetings that lingered from eircom’s history as a state-run company. eircom partnered with Microsoft to design its ‘New World of Work Program,’ a philosophy that focuses IT strategy on the information worker as the underpinnings of a new corporate culture. eircom then began implementing a suite of Microsoft® technologies chosen to optimize business productivity through improved communication and collaboration. The results of an early pilot project show tangible productivity improvements and time savings adding up to a potential value of many millions of euros.
Global Telco Pilots Collaborative Knowledge Management to Drive R&D Innovation
Since its inception 125 years ago, one of the largest telecommunications companies has been contributing to technology innovation and economic development. The company is looking to improve its research and development (R&D) processes, develop innovative products and services to meet customer needs, and shorten the time required to get products to market. To improve its ability to capture and share knowledge the company chose the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. Based on the first phase of a pilot program for a Microsoft-based knowledge management environment, the company expects to reduce time to market , decrease operating costs by U.S.$150,000 in the first year, and increase its R&D tax credit by 15 percent. The company plans to deploy the knowledge management solution in late 2007.
Mobile Communications Provider Maximizes Efficiency and Improves Collaboration
As the third-largest and fastest-growing mobile communications provider in Ireland, Meteor Mobile Communications wanted to sustain its rapid growth in the very competitive mobile communications market. The company needed to achieve high levels of efficiency, responsiveness, and collaboration. After a detailed assessment of its user application software, Meteor management made a decision to upgrade its workstations to the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. With a new intuitive user interface and productivity capabilities, Meteor standardized its enterprise environment on the 2007 Office system and deployed collaboration tools that enabled both local and remote users to increase productivity.
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