all-round benefits

Put IT in the hands of your people – A business can grow and prosper if technology is in place to help staff succeed

It's no longer good enough to leave strategic decision-making to gut feeling. Senior executive strategising and decision-making requires the support of accurate and timely business information.

Having user-friendly tools to access business-critical information eliminates complicated and manually intensive processes that can divert employees'attention from the job at hand. At the same time, these tools also allow your people to share ideas and insight more effectively, as well as save time and get better organised from day to day.

The IT industry has historically been guilty of over-promising and under-delivering. But a quick look around any organisation can provide examples of where technology is, or could be, delivering tangible benefits – not just at a process level but also from the point of view of helping people carry out their responsibilities more effectively.

For example, personal assistants and operational staff can bring value to the business by using the latest calendar, contact and productivity features of the PC systems they use every day to quickly share appointments and documents to ensure the smooth running of business operations.

Sales managers can use customer relationship management tools to get a single view of each customer and improve service levels. Finance departments can aggregate accurate operational and financial data and then use analytics and business intelligence tools to interpret and share meaningful information in support of wider business goals, key decision-making processes and strategic planning.

IT managers can take advantage of the latest virtualisation and automation tools to drive down costs, while also ensuring that critical company data is secure and accessible. And every employee can use communications tools such as mobile, conferencing and messaging systems to help them work more effectively, when, where and how they want to.

Successful organisations, such as those highlighted in this supplement, realise that technology is the key to harnessing the true value of a business. As Daniel Gwalter, head of IT at Partnership, explains: “What we have done with this technology has grown – so much so that the technology investment has turned out to be of real benefit to the business.”

Case study – vital stats that changed the way partnership operates

The latest technology tools can help companies gain real insights that will help them to improve revenue. Key information is put into the hands of the people who need it to run the business, and this is done in a way that saves them time and improves organisational structures, without adding red tape. Productivity is boosted too, while costs are cut (including those of IT) and risks controlled.

Partnership, a fast-growing UK financial services specialist serving customers with health conditions, realised it needed to make key business performance data available to those who drive the business – its people – using technology as the basis for an overhaul of management processes.

The annuities insurance firm installed a Microsoft SQL Server–based environment to support real–time, high–volume financial and statistical sales data, and this has allowed all Partnership staff to access and manipulate relevant performance metrics though a web browser.

“The original work we undertook was driven by the knowledge that, with Microsoft, we wouldn't need to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on cross–platform systems that could manage our finances, day–to–day operations, performance and targets,” says Daniel Gwalter, head of IT at Partnership.

By using in–house IT skills to create data warehouses and integrate with Microsoft reporting tools, sales managers can track performance against a number of criteria. “We can identify where customers are doing business, but perhaps not with us,” Gwalter explains. “And we achieved the ability to segment data within six weeks, where a specialised business intelligence package may have taken eight to 10 months to implement, with external business analysts who don't fully understand our business model.”

Even Human Resources has benefited, he notes. “HR spends time creating reports relating to salary brackets and performance ratings to send on to managers. The technology enables the department to concentrate on using its HR skills rather than writing reports.”
Says Ed Davidson, Partnership service delivery department manager: “For me, the management information that is driven by our systems not only provides my teams with the tools to do the job; they also provide me with the information on which to base resource and priority decisions.”
He adds: “The management information significantly shortens my monthly reporting cycle from being a process that would take days to complete to one that is achievable in a matter of hours.”

business insight

Taste the power of intelligence – High-quality insight used to be the sole preserve of big business. Not any longer.

Many of us will have heard IT firms talk about “disparate data locked in information silos.” In reality, this translates to eliminating the need to trawl through paper or electronic files, spreadsheets and documents to answer what should be easy questions, like: “Who are our most valuable customers? or How quickly do we handle the most common customer queries?”

This kind of insight is vital for turning hunches into successful business strategies and decisions that organisations can use to meet challenges and capitalise on business opportunities quickly and effectively. It can throw light on where a business is not performing as well as it might, so that limited resources can be targeted to maximum effect. And, with a single version of the truth, a business can make sure all of its people are pulling in the right direction.

Gaining business insight therefore, by definition, demands a thorough understanding of every part of each process that contributes to performance. But accessing that insight is only half the story; putting the information at the fingertips of those whose decisions might improve every area of the organisation can deliver competitive advantage.

But accessing insight and efficiency benefits through modules such as business intelligence, customer relationship management, analytics, and even enterprise resource planning systems need not be the sole preserve of major multinational corporations. The Microsoft portfolio includes the likes of SQL, SharePoint and Dynamics, which offer cost-effective access to collaborative business insight tools and have the familiar look and feel of its Office productivity suite to get an organisation up and running quickly.

Observes Kelly O'Neill of Fortress Interlocks: “The Dynamics NAV system is how I do my job; I use it to find quotes, create new customers, trace old customers, find potential pockets of new business, help with marketing campaigns, up-selling and pinpointing areas that might need more focus.”

So an organisation of any size can combine disparate data to create easily digested, manipulated and shared reports or processes that manage everything from order-to-cash or general ledger processes. And its people can be empowered to make faster, better and smarter decisions that benefit the business as a whole.

Case study – fortress interlocks finds the key to meeting the needs of its customers

Producing specialist locking systems for dangerous machines and hazardous processes means that Fortress Interlocks needs to have a holistic view of everything in its business – from the combinations of its locks and its manufacturing processes through to its customer orders. The company has offices around the world, so it is vital for customer services that there is a trail of information about each specific order, allowing sales teams from any country to pick up quickly on a customer enquiry.

Kelly O'Neill, internal sales at Fortress Interlocks, uses newly deployed Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 finance and business software, running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V virtualisation, day in and day out to help her manage customers, find new business and indentify new segments of the market to target.

By using the automated processes within the new system, O'Neill says the time it takes to generate a quote has been reduced so dramati-cally that she believes she can generate more than double the number of quotes that she was able to previously.

“It's not just about the time-saving though,” she explains. “Sales are about customer service and, because we can now track the history of every single customer, we can offer them a better service and find out everything they may need, from where their order is to tweaking quotes, to knowing what level of discount they get. I have a visibility across the business, which keeps everything transparent.”

Adds Steve Purchase, admin co-ordinator at Fortress Interlocks: “Previously, it would take a very long time to input all the sales orders, including all the specialist items such as the engravings or the combination numbers for the locks, because they all sat on different systems.”

“Now the systems are all merged, so it's much quicker. Also, it's all automated; so whereas before I would print out each sales order, then go downstairs and physically take it to the manufacturing department, this is now done automatically by the new system.”

Mike Golding, Fortress Interlocks managing director, says the system touches most people in the organisation, from the CEO EO to the shopfloor. “In a business like ours, with mixed manufacturing and admin, the features of the technology are able to help our company in a multitude of ways, from driving revenue and increasing productivity to being flexible and making it easier to drill down into the business.

“We've adapted our processes, which are then supported by the technology, and helped our business become more effective and efficient.”

teamwork

Seamless sharing of informationdrives flexibility – Wherever staff are based, ensure that they can view and edit information in easy collaboration

What if you could give your people access to information in a flexible way that reduced time wasted searching through data and eliminated paper-based, manually intensive and static processes? Modern software can maximise your employees’ effectiveness wherever they are, as well as generally reducing costs, eliminating unnecessary duplication of effort and raising both productivity and customer service levels.

By having ready access to the information they need to do their day-to-day jobs, regardless of whether they’re in the office or not, your people can collaborate and share knowledge more efficiently.

Indeed, every organisation is looking to innovate, drive productivity gains, consolidate spending on areas like IT and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage through workforce efficiency and agility. But only those supported by a comprehensive and flexible technology platform that extends beyond traditional fileshare and email-based collaboration systems, offering self-service collaborative workspaces, portals and social computing tools that reflect the way we work today, will be able to harness these benefits fully.

This is why the latest Microsoft productivity, collaboration and mobility solutions have been designed with simplified management and user-friendliness as their key deliverables. The likes of Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Live Meeting and Windows Mobile work seamlessly together to help access and share accurate and up-to-date information faster and more effectively.

For example, using Office Groove 2007 or SharePoint Online allows multiple people to view and edit the same document, as well as co-ordinate task lists and share research, wherever its participants are based.

Simon Bulleyment of accountancy firm haysmacintyre (see opposite) explains how a recent IT project to electronically organise its information and day-to-day tasks has given both the business and IT peace of mind, while also supporting its complex compliance requirements. “The overall impact on productivity and service levels was key,” he says, “but the disaster recovery and business continuity benefits mean we can securely store documents for the regulated amount of time. And, if there’s a fire, we don’t have to trundle down the road with lots of discs, as we can also securely access backed-up files wherever we ar&rdquoe.;

Case study – haysmacintyre files big time savings with documents system

Successful businesses provide a more fertile environment for people to share information and get organised, which can foster improved service levels, a culture of innovation, increased business agility and speed to market.

One such firm that has already discovered these benefits for itself is haysmacintyre, a leading London-based accountancy firm that has used new technology systems to eliminate paper trails, collaborate more effectively and provide a more responsive client service, regardless of where its people are based.

Much of haysmacintyre’s essential communication with clients is, nowadays, carried out electronically, which speeds response times and improves data-retention processes. But, without a system to organise the management and retrieval of client files, haysmacintyre staff found it hard to track and share such electronic documents, spreadsheets, reports and publications. Says haysmacintyre partner Bernadette Pritchard: “The system we developed means I don’t have to trawl through files or paper copies to find certain working documents. And it cuts down on staff running around to different floors to locate them. We’re saving time, doing it all from our desk.”

The firm created its eDocs system on top of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007. Explains Simon Bulleyment, haysmacintyre chief information officer: “We wanted to automate the document storage-and-retrieval procedure to help make staff more efficient.”

Adds Pritchard: “I can respond in real-time to clients who may phone me up with a query. I am more efficient with my time, so now instead of telling them to ’just bear with me’, I can pull up the relevant document on the screen in front of me to answer their query there and then.”

Catherine Darcy works as a secretary to Pritchard and one other partner, managing their day-to-day tasks. “With eDocs, I know everything has been filed correctly,“ she says, ”so I can find documents easily and know that it is the most up–to–date version available.” The integration with Outlook calendars and other Office systems is also a useful time-saving organisation tool, she adds. ”There’s no hunting through, looking for client codes, names or addresses – it’s all in there.

”When I have to type up a new document, the templates are all there for me to use. eDocs saves everything centrally, so individuals must have authorisation to delete anything, which also prevents different people duplicating the same document. By using the calendar, I always know where Bernadette is,“ she adds.

boosting sales

How IT IT can give a slingshot – Technology can be harnessed in a variety of ways to achieve everything from raising your hit rate to boosting revenue. At the forefront are tools to help you understand your clients

The best businesses grow from great ideas. But technology, nowadays, can actually facilitate the faster translation of those great ideas into revenue-generating opportunities. The growth of the internet is testament to this, where few would have predicted a decade ago that it would be capable of providing a marketplace worth tens of billions of pounds each year in the UK alone.

Fostering innovation, collaboration and faster, smarter business processes and models is where technology delivers true business value in terms of attracting or retaining customers, or the agility to break into new markets or territories. In fact, technology that improves customer relationships and actively promotes higher service levels can only add to the bottom line.

The challenges that businesses face are twofold: to find and exploit new business opportunities while retaining existing customers, as well as attracting new ones. So it is critical to be able to conduct customer analysis and evaluate buying patterns – for example, to maximise the responsiveness and effectiveness of product and marketing strategies and spend. And without a clear, single and up-to-date view of customers, such as that provided by Microsoft Dynamics’ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it can be difficult to identify which customers, services and/or products generate the most revenue or to capitalise quickly on new, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

A tight focus on managing customer relationships more effectively and efficiently can provide a key weapon at a time when businesses need all the help they can get. Marrying relevant sales and customer data in one integrated, centralised place makes it easier to shorten sales cycles and improve win rates, with better lead and opportunity management. It can also be the catalyst for a range of initiatives to improve service levels and response times at reduced cost.

Sam Berry, sales manager at Signposter.com (see below), explains below how technology has helped double his revenue targets by engaging more efficiently with customers. ”It is so much quicker to use that the amount of people I speak to has probably increased fivefold, so I can drive up more new business than I ever had the time to before.“

Case study – Signposter off to a flying start with innovative mapping tool

Emerging businesses in the UK often believe that they cannot afford the time or money to market themselves through outdoor advertising on bill-boards or at bus stops. However, Signposter.com is an innovative new startup backed by media group WPP that has placed mapping technology at the heart of its proposition, to open up the outdoor advertising market to small businesses in the UK.

By using Microsoft’s Bing mapping technology on its website alongside Microsoft’s database systems, small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can get a detailed, up-to-date visual display of the location of their billboard adver-tisements and view any restrictions on that board and the days and times they are available for use.

This allows Signposter.com’s sales manager Sam Berry to focus on his core job – winning new business – so that anything else he does to help improve customer relationships and raise cus-tomer service levels can only help add to the bottom line.

“With more traditional methods of outdoor advertising, customers would need to speak to two or three media owners, plan campaigns and find out where the sites are,” he says. ”But with the Bing mapping technology and all the data about each billboard sitting on our SQL database, we can give them all this information instantly.”

For Berry, the ability to plan customer campaigns in minutes rather than days has a dual benefit. “It means I can handle more customer enquiries per day – which, in turn, means more sales per day. And it means those customers get a better, faster and more efficient service from us.”

The result of this, according to Simon Read, Signposter.com’s chief executive, is that the company has doubled its targets, with 3,000 customers registering on the website just six months after launching the mapping functionality. “The technology is bringing the market to life. We make it entirely visual for our customers, whereas beforehand it was spreadsheet-based and very two-dimensional.”

And, adds Berry, because of the visual element of the mapping technology and the amount of data that customers can access on each ad-vertising site, there’s also less dead time in his day. ”It’s a more efficient use of my time to be speaking with customers rather than driving around various sites in the UK.“

This allows Signposter.com to operate effi-ciently all over the country. ”We can help a com-edian who wants to advertise on one billboard outside the Hackney Empire where he is playing, all the way through to an estate agent who wants some localised advertising in Aberdeen,“ con-cludes Berry.

reducing costs

Trust technology to cut costs and reduce risks – Consolidated IT can drive compliance, security, resilience and reliability, all at greater economy

The “information” in Information Technology (IT) is there, it could be argued, to remind us that the implementation of technology for its own sake is of no good to anyone. IT needn’t be just a cost centre but can deliver true business value by – as we have seen throughout this supplement – providing the basis for revenue–generation, as well as cutting operating costs.

Modern IT that cuts down on the cost, complexity and downtime of both the technology system itself and the day–to–day tasks of those who rely on it can really be said to be delivering value. But it can also help reduce the risk of sensitive information getting into the wrong hands and ensure that the right information is available for complying with regulations.

With the cost of security breaches increasingly measured in terms of lingering reputational damage, as well as regulatory fines and the cost of implementing remedial measures, it’s no wonder that organisations are taking a closer look at IT cost and risk. Technology products providing anti–virus, firewalls, secure access, back-up and storage, together with hardware consolidation or virtualisation, are essential business tools nowadays.

But even as companies are forced to do more with less, when it comes to security and reliability, they must make the leap from a reliance on risky, reactive fire-fighting to proactively planning strategic business and initiating IT projects that add resilience and reliability across the entire organisation.

So by consolidating existing IT infrastructures onto an integrated server suite – such as Microsoft’s Windows Essential Business Server 2008 – it is possible to reduce operational costs at the same time as optimising the efficiency of the IT systems. This also provides the foundation to streamline IT management overheads with Microsoft System Centre and to crack down on security with Microsoft’s security tools such as ForeFront.

As Gerry Lawrence, chief technical officer at managed IT service provider NetBenefit, points out (see opposite), his firm’s move to Microsoft’s latest server platform has enabled it to provide new and advanced customer services. “We’re able to offer technology solutions that are so much more resilient with virtualisation technology, as well as way better value for money.”

Case study – NetBenefit passes on to its customers a platform for cash-saving consolidation

The customers of NetBenefit rely on the techno-logy infrastructure the managed hosting company provides to keep their business up and running from day to day.

Says NetBenefit’s marketing manager Kristel Scattergood: “We provide our customers with a wide range of solutions, from single virtual private servers to complex hosting platforms, typically with 10 or 20 servers. Many of our customers have already made their technology decision in favour of Windows or Linux when they approach us.

”However, our decision to work with Microsoft’s Hyper–V technology means that we are making use of our existing high levels of in-house Micro-soft expertise and the impressive virtualisation technology available with Windows 2008 R2, irrespective of the operating system the customer chooses to place on the virtual private server they buy from us.”

The Microsoft Gold Certified Partner was one of the first to trial and implement a Windows Server 2008-based server farm with Hyper-V virtualisation technology – which has formed the basis of its new–ly launched virtualisation platform, called Ultra-V.
Adds Scattergood: “The introduction of Microsoft’s virtualisation technology allowed us to go to market with an affordable virtual server solution.”

The use of Microsoft technology is of just as much tactical, strategic and operational impor-tance to the company as it is to its customer offering, explains NetBenefit’s chief technical officer Gerry Lawrence. NetBenefit has been able to harness the consolidation benefits built into Microsoft’s new server product for both itself and its customers. These benefits includes reduced IT–related energy consumption and management overheads.

“We are able to offer technology solutions that are so much more resilient with virtualisation technology, as well as way better value for money,” says Lawrence. “And, internally, our systems administrators have found the new management interfaces easy to use, as they are consistent with the existing systems we run.”

Adds Richard Rustean, NetBenefit’s senior Windows engineer: “We’re keen to automate as much of our work as possible so that we can concentrate on adding value to the customer experience. Day–to–day tasks like deploying websites can be time–consuming, so we appreciate the new technology features that mean we can carry out tasks such as this more quickly and ease the administrative burden.”

The company is also in the process of rolling out Microsoft Dynamics for customer relationship management and Navision for accounting. “We have already seen the business benefits of working with the latest release of Microsoft Office and look forward to being early adopters of Windows 7 desktop operating system,” concludes Lawrence.

Getting Results

The use of technolgy unlocks the true potential of your people

Recent Microsoft research has found that current UK business priorities tend to fall into four main categories: improving productivity and efficiency; retaining and attracting customers; cutting costs; and generating more revenue. No surprises there then, especially given that these are the aims most likely to provide a good operational foundation to capitalise on any wider future economic upturn.

But the companies featured in this supplement prove that equipping people with the right tools to help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently will help to achieve these goals.

By looking at the way technology can engender granular and incremental, as well as wholesale, business improvement among an organisation’s people and processes, many businesses are unlocking their true potential. They do away with disconnected business systems, manual operations, multiple views of operational and financial data, and inflexible business models.

But massive, bespoke technology projects are not the only way to harness these benefits in your own organisation; simple or small changes facilitated by technology, such as the synchronised calendaring features used by haysmacintyre (p7) or the use of mapping technology for Signposter.com’s customers (p9), can deliver lots of small savings in time or cost and efficiencies that add up to substantial value. So Microsoft has listened to its customers and identified eight ways in which software can drive tangible business value from the bottom of the organisation up.

Eight ways to realise value through the use of software:

To find out more about how Microsoft software has been developed to meet these aims, visit www.microsoft.com/uk/howmany