Central Australia Financial Planners
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Company Overview
Central Australia Financial Planners (CAFP) has been providing financial planning and insurance assistance to Alice Springs businesses, professionals, retirees and individuals since 1982. With his two business partners and six staff members, Jeff Tubbenhauer has built CAFP into one of the Northern Territory’s most respected and reliable financial planning companies.
When Tubbenhauer adopted Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, he set out to give CAFP staff members highly effective desktop tools that require little training and help them boost their efficiency. “Within weeks of introducing Office 2003 to the company, our people were at last seeing the reality of information at their fingertips,” he says. “With the same tools, I was improving our marketing efforts and the amount of desktop software support that was needed had dropped off significantly.”
Business Challenge
“While I feel I am quite competent when it comes to IT, it isn’t my core competency so I need to bring in technology solutions that are powerful but, above all, simple for the users and require minimum support from me.”
Having already upgraded the company’s PCs to Microsoft Windows XP, a move to which he attributes a great deal of time savings in support, Tubbenhauer had certain reservations about retaining Office 2000 as the standard desktop application suite. “With our PCs running Windows XP, I decided that staying with Office 2000 wasn’t the right decision if I wanted an IT environment that would help the company become more competitive.”
Solution
In late August 2003, Tubbenhauer participated in the Microsoft Office System Rapid Adoption Program. “I wanted to evaluate the new application suite and see if it had the potential to improve the productivity for myself and other staff members, as well as reduce the amount of time I spend providing IT support.”
In commenting further on his reasons for adopting Office 2003, Tubbenhauer says: “We had one instance last year when we commissioned the development of a database application. Unfortunately, it was developed using a third-party database program and soon afterwards, the developer moved away from Alice Springs. The result was that when we needed support, there wasn’t anyone locally who had enough expertise to help us out. This is the sort of problem any sort of business can’t afford; and it’s why I now have a strong preference to deal only with software that has a very broad support base.”
Business Benefits
Marketing tools on hand
Marketing CAFP has always been a high priority for Tubbenhauer; and allocating the time and money for this essential part of building the business doesn’t necessarily reflect its importance. While larger businesses can devote greater personnel and financial resources to marketing, Tubbenhauer has always maintained a policy of doing the best he can with the tools at hand.
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With Office Professional Edition 2003, Tubbenhauer set out to revamp CAFP’s marketing efforts, which now encompass a Web site, Capabilities and Credentials booklet, a client loyalty program and e-mail newsletter.
“Having Office 2003 means that aside from having normal office productivity tools, I have a full suite of marketing tools,” Tubbenhauer states. “Why bother going out and spending a fortune on third-party products, when everything you need to develop marketing materials is already on-hand?
“I use Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 to design and maintain the company’s Web site; and based on an article I read on the Microsoft Australia bCentral Web site, even use it to create an e-mail newsletter I send out to clients every couple of months.
“For the booklet, I put it together in Word 2003 using Microsoft Visio charts, Excel spreadsheets and other Word documents,” he continues. “Images, charts and tables some of the most useful tools we have in explaining to people how our services can benefit them. The ability to manipulate these in something as straightforward as a word processor is an absolute boon – there’s no need to purchase another program and then spend time learning how to use it.”
“If I need to make modifications to either the Web site or booklet, it can be done in a matter of minutes, which means I’m saving an enormous amount of time but still getting the best results. It’s all done using an application I already use every day for my normal work.”
Keeping sticky notes at bay with One Note
For CAFP’s office manager and commercial and personal insurance consultant, Karen McCorgill, the installation of Office Professional Edition 2003 on her PC has delivered greater control over information, especially with Microsoft Office OneNote 2003. This newly introduced application is designed for capturing, organising and reusing notes (NB: OneNote 2003 is not sold as part of the Office Professional Edition 2003). “I’m constantly gathering bits of information during meetings and phone calls,” she says. “Traditionally, I’d put everything down in a notepad or jot things down on a piece of paper. Actually, the sides of my monitor used to be almost covered with sticky notes.”
With OneNote 2003 installed on her computer, McCorgill now takes advantage of the free-form nature of the program to record anything from phone numbers to meeting notes. “One of the main problems with notepads and sticky notes is that once they’re lost, the information is gone! On the other hand, I can have my OneNote files located on the network’s file server and know that it’s backed up every day.”
Other advantages for McCorgill in using OneNote 2003 are that she is able to keep related information together rather than having it spread across a number of notepads and other scraps of paper and – at last – locate the information she needs almost immediately. “I can create a new section within OneNote or add new pages to an existing section within seconds,” she says. “As a result, I now have a very simple-to-use tool that actually helps me keep my information in the way I’m used to, but do it in a much more efficient manner than ever before.”
The online trainer
Like any other IT “all-rounder”, Tubbenhauer is the person to whom everyone within CAFP comes when they need a quick lesson on how to use their systems for something that may be out of the ordinary. When he first installed Office Professional Edition 2003 on his own machine, he quickly recognised that the days of “if you have a question about Office, then just ask Jeff” would soon be over.
“I always like to familiarise myself with the Help options whenever I load some new software; and that’s when I clicked on the Training option and discovered the Microsoft Office Online Training sessions,” he explained. “Instead of learning by trial-or-error, buying a book, or paying for a trainer to come in, we’re able to use the Online Training options straight from any of the Office 2003 applications and step through the lessons whenever they’re needed…for free.
“When I consider the absolute ease of transition from Office 2000 to Office 2003 because of the improved interface and consistency with previous versions, along with the online training facilities, I estimate that I’ll save at least two-to-three hours a week that I would otherwise spend dealing with software support issues.”
“The simple task of upgrading to Office Professional 2003 is removing much of the IT support burden from my shoulders, getting our staff members to start really exploiting the new power of their desktops, improve our marketing and let me concentrate more on running and building the business,” Tubbenhauer stated. “It’s the ideal small business solution.”
