HealthSTAR Communications

Marketer Uses Proposal Generation System to Reduce Proposal Prep Time by 60 Percent

HealthSTAR Communications is a marketing services company that assists healthcare clients through the full life cycle of their marketing activities. As the healthcare industry embraced strategic sourcing, HealthSTAR began receiving requests for more comprehensive proposals, which took more time to create. HealthSTAR worked with Quality Technology Solutions, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to create a new proposal generation system, using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to build a searchable document library and Office Word 2007 to search for needed material. The solution is reducing proposal creation time by 60 percent and producing higher quality proposals. A planned move to the Windows Vista™ operating system will give HealthSTAR even better information search capabilities, help provide portable computers with enhanced security, and lower IT support costs.

 

Situation

The healthcare industry has historically disaggregated its purchasing of services, engaging a number of vendors in a nonintegrated manner. Over the past few years, however, the industry has moved to reduce the number of vendors providing similar services, required vendors to integrate appropriate service offerings, and formalized the purchasing process by implementing strategic sourcing initiatives. These moves have required healthcare industry vendors to expand their offerings, integrate services, and develop complex systems to track, report, and comply with new reporting requirements.

We are more efficiently and effectively able to produce high-quality proposals and better utilize our executive management time to develop strategic concepts versus search for content. Jim Sivori Chief Technology Officer, HealthSTAR Communications

More Authors, Higher Costs
This turn of events was both good and bad for HealthSTAR Communications, a leading healthcare marketing services company. It was good, because HealthSTAR was already taking an integrated network approach to providing marketing services and was well positioned to win more of this business. Through a series of acquisitions and business growth, HealthSTAR has created a diverse, global company to assist its clients throughout the full spectrum of marketing activities. HealthSTAR services include strategic communications planning, creative design, advertising, public relations, medical education and content development, event services, and promotional meeting management. The Woodbridge, New Jersey–based company has approximately 400 employees in 13 locations around the world, with annual revenues of U.S.$220 million.

However, the vendor consolidation move among healthcare companies also created challenges for HealthSTAR. Suddenly, six or seven divisions were involved in responding to requests for proposal (RFPs) versus one or two. “The complexity of RFPs increased dramatically, requiring triple the number of authors,” explains Jim Sivori, Chief Technology Officer for HealthSTAR Communications. “Most of these authors were senior executives whose time is extremely valuable. Each RFP was requiring at least 40 hours of work, spread across 4 to 8 execs. It was not uncommon to have 15 people involved. We estimated that RFPs were consuming at least 10 to 20 percent of valuable executive time.”

Hard-to-Access Content
HealthSTAR wanted to be able to more efficiently and effectively produce proposals by providing easy access to standardized proposal content and shifting executive time-savings to developing the strategic vision for each proposal. To do this, executives needed to be able to easily access stored content from a number of areas, including subject matter stored on individual hard disk drives and network file servers.

“We had libraries of material tucked away on individual desktop computers but no way to access them,” says Lloyd Chesney, Senior Vice President of IT for HealthSTAR Communications. “Our proposal process was a manual, time-consuming one with no standardization or automation. And it’s a process that currently occurs one to three times each week and is going to increase as the company grows. We had to find a more efficient and cost-effective way to create proposals.”

Another issue was quality, which sometimes suffered when several RFPs arrived on the same desks at the same time. “We know when we’ve done an outstanding job versus merely a good job,” Chesney says. “Our proposal reflects the kind of job that we would do for the customer if we win the bid, so being adequate isn’t enough. We have to be outstanding.”

Portable Computer Security Threats
While HealthSTAR executives were spending inordinate amounts of time on proposals, the IT staff was spending increasing amounts of time supporting and securing the company’s growing fleet of portable computers.

“Laptop computer theft is on the rise, and the value of the information stored on the computer is far greater than the value of the computer itself,” Chesney says. “Virtually all our managers use laptops and travel a great deal, and the threat of losing confidential corporate data was making management nervous. My staff needed to improve portable computer security and reduce the time that it spent on managing desktop and portable computer users in general.”

Solution

The HealthSTAR IT staff first addressed the proposal bottleneck, launching an intensive search for an automated proposal generation solution. There were several such products on the market, but they were expensive and presented yet another program on the desktop for the IT staff to integrate and maintain, and for users to learn and use. About this time, Sivori and Chesney decided to investigate the Windows Vista™ operating system and the 2007 Microsoft® Office system.

“What jumped out at us were the XML document format of Microsoft Office Word 2007 and the concept of being able to use keywords to find documents in a library,” Chesney says. “We realized that we could build our own proposal generation solution from the 2007 Microsoft Office system and expand it any way that we wanted, without expensive third-party customizations.”

HealthSTAR engaged Quality Technology Solutions (QTS) of Morris Plains, New Jersey, to help install Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and create the solution. The Microsoft Gold Certified Partner suggested complementing the keyword search capabilities of Office Word 2007 with the document repos¬itory and search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

“We realized that this would be a Word-centric solution, with authors pulling content from Office SharePoint Server 2007,” says Neil Rosenberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of Quality Technology Solutions. “We needed a way to make information stored in SharePoint Server 2007 readily available from within Word 2007.”

We realized that we could build our own proposal generation solution from the 2007 Microsoft Office system and expand it any way that we wanted, without expensive third-party customizations. Lloyd Chesney Senior Vice President of IT, HealthSTAR Communications

Using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office system, QTS created a “document assembly pane,” a custom task pane that an author can open while writing and search for needed content in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 document library. Imagine an employee working on an RFP and coming to the question, “What are your special abilities in managing conference accommodations?” The author can open the document assembly pane and browse a folder list in a SharePoint site, organized by keyword topics, to find documents that contain the needed content. The author can insert the content into the proposal and continue writing.

Ultimately, the HealthSTAR document assembly pane will allow authors to simply enter a keyword and have Office SharePoint Server 2007 search the entire document library to locate content even faster.

“The development work to create the document assembly pane was about a fifth of what it would have been with previous-generation tools,” Rosenberg says. “We took advantage of the document library capabilities built into Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the XML capabilities of Office Word 2007. We really just built the glue to connect the two. SharePoint Server 2007 has a huge amount of functionality and reusability built into the base code.”

HealthSTAR anticipates even more supercharged searches once the solution is running on Windows Vista. “We have a great deal of content stored on file servers that we’d like to search for proposal purposes, information we’ll be able to access with Windows Vista,” Sivori says.

With the new operating system, the HealthSTAR IT staff also has tools for easier desktop and portable computer deployment, support, and security. The IT staff plans to use the Windows® imaging component of the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment 2007 to reduce the time spent on image management while keeping desktop computers current. HealthSTAR is in the process of rolling out Windows Vista to a subset of the company’s users and plans to deploy companywide in early 2007.

Benefits

The HealthSTAR proposal generation solution is expected to decrease proposal preparation time by 60 percent, providing up to $500,000 in annual productivity savings by freeing up executive time for higher-value activities. It will also help improve the quality and success rate of proposals. Use of Windows Vista will contribute to more secure portable computers and easier desktop and portable computer deployment and management.

60 Percent Reduction in Proposal Preparation Time
The new proposal generation solution is expected to reduce proposal preparation time by 60 percent and enable HealthSTAR to reduce the amount of executive time spent on information searches. Mid-level employees will be able to assist in the proposal development process using standard language in Office Word 2007 documents hosted on an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. Executives will have more time to focus on each proposal’s strategic vision and unique execution components.

“We are more efficiently and effectively able to produce high-quality proposals and better utilize our executive management time to develop strategic concepts versus search for content,” Sivori says. “This savings allows us to respond to more RFPs faster and redirect senior management time into higher value activities. As we expand, the increased efficiency of this key business process will enable, and even accelerate, our growth.”

$500,000 in Annual Productivity Savings
By relieving management of approximately 24 hours of work for every proposal, HealthSTAR estimates that it will realize $500,000 in annual productivity savings. This soft savings is time that can be redirected to higher value activities such as closing deals, running the business, and building customer relationships.

Productivity Boost from Better Search Capabilities
Beyond proposal preparation, HealthSTAR is looking forward to additional companywide productivity gains from the search capabilities built into Windows Vista. “The average employee spends at least 10 to 20 minutes a day looking for information in e-mail messages, memos, spreadsheets, lists, and other documents,” Sivori says. “Employees testing Windows Vista have seen information search time cut to 4 to 5 minutes a day. This seems small, but it represents more than a week a year of recovered time per employee, the value of which is truly significant.”

Says Chesney, “The combination of the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista will give us a powerful set of tools that will boost the productivity of our entire staff in doing everything from simple searches to merging information in documents. Because the 2007 release is so easy to use, employees will be encouraged to use programs that they might not have used before, to create better presentations, proposals, and reports. Ultimately, we see that use of the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista will yield better insights to help us guide our business.”

More Sales from Higher Quality Proposals
Because HealthSTAR now can fashion significant chunks of proposals from proven, standardized content, the company can focus more attention on the unique requirements of each customer and add greater customization and value to each proposal. This results in a higher quality, more compelling proposal and more closed sales.

“The higher the quality of the response, the better chance that we win the business,” Chesney says. “Quality in our business might mean adding graphics or dropping in targeted research from a third-party report. If you have only a week to respond to an RFP, those kinds of extras often go by the wayside. Having such resources at our fingertips means that every proposal can be remarkable rather than just good.”

Enhanced Computer Security
Using Windows Vista, the HealthSTAR IT staff will be able to reduce the effort required to implement secure desktop and portable computer environments, through the ability to restrict user permissions, remove administrator rights from desktop computers, and better lock down the desktop environment. HealthSTAR will use the Windows BitLocker™ Drive Encryption feature to provide machine-level data protection, which helps safeguard data in case a portable computer is stolen.

Eight-Month Return on Investment
IT staff will use Windows imaging technology to significantly accelerate deployment of a consistent desktop image to desktop and portable computers. “Windows Vista will provide our users with a more reliable, better performing machine and a better user experience,” says Chesney. “We expect that this will reduce support calls. We’ll recover the cost of the upgrade within eight months on productivity gains alone.”

Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office

Windows Vista
Windows Vista can help your organization use information technology to gain a competitive advantage in today’s new world of work. Your people will be able to find and use information more effectively. You will be able to support your mobile work force with better access to shared data and collaboration tools. And your IT staff will have better tools and technologies to enhance corporate IT security, data protection, and more efficient deployment and management.

For more information about Windows Vista, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsvista
 

For More Information

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www.microsoft.com

For more information about Quality Technology Solutions products and services, call (973) 984-7600 or visit the Web site at:
www.qtsnet.com

For more information about HealthSTAR Communications products and services, call (732) 726-0251 or visit the Web site at:
www.healthstarcom.com