Peak Energy shares its form

How does a company keep up with the changing business climate? Efficiency is one, critical method. This means making the most of your IT spend, streamlining your business process, and making IT a strategic partner in your organization. All three of these options can be facilitated by increasing your organization's ability to share information.

Peak Energy is one of many companies achieving efficiency gains through sharing. Founded in 1996 and based in Calgary, Peak is a diversified energy services company that provides a wide range of support services to oil and gas producers. Having experienced significant growth since its inception, the company determined that a fundamental change was essential to support its new acquisitions and expanded product lines.

In an effort to fulfill the company's mission to be a "proactive, solutions-driven organization," Justin Miller, Peak's Manager Information Systems, recommended and implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

"We started looking around in '04 or '05 at the SharePoint non-portal and portal services," says Miller. "When I joined Peak, they had a mish-mash of stuff all over the place, including a Lotus Notes environment."

The company was going through a rapid and aggressive acquisition phase, doubling its size. The Notes environment was the closest thing the company had to an intranet or document repository. In effect, Peak was expected to integrate the acquisition of another company by adding another folder to the file share.

This is a familiar story to independent technology analyst Carmi Levy.

"Many companies today are double-challenged," says Levy. "They're stuck covering more work with fewer bodies. The competitive landscape hasn't eased any, so they need to find some way to streamline workflow."

And Miller knew that if he didn't find a way to do this his organization could be in deep trouble. As a result, his assessment to Peak's board was that the company would experience a dramatic failure within a year and a half if this trend continued. Simply put, the legacy architecture was a recipe for potential disaster.

Getting started
"The first goal was to get everybody back to the common concept of information sharing between teams," says Miller.

Prior to the implementation, Peak did feasibility studies on how long it would take to get expense reports and related materials from the field into the office, with less than inspiring results. As a result, the most noticeable initial benefit of the SharePoint-based tools was bringing the disparate corporate groups together for common items like expense reports, HR forms and timesheets.

This isn't a surprise to Levy.

"Solutions like SharePoint can easily integrate greater levels of collaboration into everyday workflows without forcing end-users to radically alter the way they work," he says. "They use familiar tools, which SharePoint then builds on top of."

It was good news for Miller, too, because it meant that early on the in the process the workforce could experience the benefits. Getting people onside at the beginning certainly has its advantages.

"That was the biggest bang for the buck, right out of the gate," says Miller.

Collaboration tools get integrated Miller's team then integrated InfoPath-based forms on the front-end to streamline data collection and take it to a SharePoint-based library. Using Office InfoPath 2007, Peak found they could create and deploy electronic forms solutions to gather information. The InfoPath Forms Services capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 enabled Peak to extend their business processes beyond the office to reach their mobile workforce and customer base.

"Making structure out of the unstructured is a key element in addressing this need to extend processes," says Levy. "Employees spend huge amounts of time creating, sharing and interactively updating unstructured content, and conventional tools like word processors and e-mails simply aren't equipped on their own to actively support this growing collaborative need."

A major requirement for Peak was that any change be easy for the workforce to adopt. This meant a familiar and consistent user experience that would not require a steep learning curve - and SharePoint delivered.

"We can put together an app quickly with the same look and feel," says Miller, "and it doesn't matter what level of user we give it to, we're to market in a week and they understand it."

These capabilities mean that mid-market companies can maintain the speed and agility of smaller firms, while also taking advantage of IT capabilities that used to be reserved for larger organizations. And with greater levels of regulatory oversight placing a growing burden on companies already struggling to rein in administrative overhead, the ability to develop practical applications fast is a huge advantage.

"Open standards make it easy to custom-develop solutions for virtually any business need, all without major up-front capital investments associated with earlier or competing solutions," says Levy.

"A business can cut out productivity-sapping paper shuffling and become more agile in the process."

Levy asserts that there is more to it than making the introduction of new workflows virtually transparent for the end users in the field: the technology adds IT functionality while actually taking some of the weight off of IT workers.

"The platform doesn't force IT to jump through hoops to implement and maintain it," he says. "It's the best of both worlds for companies interested in boosting productivity without expensive and disruptive capital investment in end-user software."

For Miller it is the combination of InfoPath and SharePoint that has made all the difference. In one example, a new hire form comes in through InfoPath from an end-user, creating an offer letter for a particular position, and it automatically populates the whole workflow right down to the type of car required, business cards made, and name plate.

"When the new hire form arrives in Calgary prior to the hire and once it is approved, it creates a stub record in our ERP, so there is no key stroke entry," he says.

Through automated workflows, collection of information up-front, and better sharing capabilities, Peak has been able to help reduce its manual HR payroll costs. Changes are now made in real-time, helping to reduce the chance of errors and improving the efficiency of the organization.

Take incident tracking. Miller notes that incident tracking was used by four groups on four servers.

"The time to maintain and the costs associated with that were crazy," he says. "Now, between InfoPath and SharePoint we've created our own internal 'Track it' - any issue you have, at any given time, including our external facing clients that rent a product from us, can log an incidence."

This has significantly helped reduce response times, improved customer service, and made it possible for accurate, pro-active decision making about any company asset.

Next steps What's next for Peak?

An external-facing order entry service that will allow customers to initiate orders from the field is in development. Once at head office, this information will be shared with 18 separate field offices, accompanied by contract-specific information from the client that will enable faster fulfillment of orders.

"Looking back," says Miller, "we took Peak from a true manual paper-based solution to front-ending the data through InfoPath, SharePoint, along with Navision ERP, SQL reports, and SQL on the back end."

As well, the option to purchase licenses via an Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) further enhanced value by giving Peak the flexibility to respond to changes without having to wait for new software or extend the budget. As new projects arise, the Enterprise CAL facilitates rapid reaction, be it a need for new software or just licenses, allowing for increased freedom in the development and testing process.