Gates Corporation

Manufacturer’s Portal Enables Continuous Improvement and Speeds Time-to-Knowledge

Gates Corporation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of industrial and automotive belts and hoses. With more than 13,500 employees in 22 countries, Gates struggles to keep very many people communicating effectively and focused on corporate objectives. To make it easier to find information scattered across the company, the IT staff created a corporate portal based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and began a rollout of the Windows Vista™ operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The portal is speeding connections to information and people and fostering continuous improvement through consistent support of corporate objectives. Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging will further reduce wasted time by speeding message processing. Windows Vista will help the IT staff be more productive by simplifying computer management and enhancing security.

 

Situation

Gates Corporation of Denver, Colorado, manufactures industrial and automotive products such as hoses, hydraulics, and power transmission products. Gates sells its products to large global automotive and industrial companies, which are under intense pressure to shorten product cycles, improve quality, and reduce time-to-market. They pass that pressure along to Gates, whose more than 13,500 employees in 22 countries are constantly looking for better ways to work together more effectively, communicate more clearly, eliminate redundant effort, and stay focused on common objectives. Every hour, day, and week lost tracking down information and re-creating work someone else has already done hinder the company’s ability to respond to its customers.

The value of 6,000 workers saving just 15 minutes a day from better information search is worth $7 million in time and talent that can be redirected to helping Gates better meet its objectives. Greg Vigil Director of Global Enterprise Collaboration, Gates Corporation

In early 2006, Gates deployed a number of Microsoft® collaboration technologies to fuel its “culture of speed.” It standardized on the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client for e-mail messaging, the Windows Server® 2003 operating system for file and print services, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 for instant messaging and presence awareness, and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services for team collaboration.

Employees especially embraced Windows SharePoint Services; within a few months, more than 500 collaboration sites dotted the company’s intranet. The upside was that hundreds of Gates teams had a central place to store and manage project documentation, project timelines, frequently asked questions, and customer issues.

The downside was that it was difficult for workers outside any given team to find the information residing on that team’s site. “We ended up with hundreds of individual collaboration sites that appeared simply as links on our intranet,” explains Greg Vigil, Director of Global Enterprise Collaboration for Gates Corporation. “If you wanted to find an expert or piece of information, you had to know the link or know someone who knew. We were losing opportunities and re-creating information that already existed.” Delays in tracking down people and information led to delays in everything from solving customer problems to delivering new products.

In addition to the cost of employee time spent searching for information or creating it anew, Gates was spending more than it needed to on servers and storage to store the same documents multiple times on different servers around the world.

A different but equally significant challenge was making sure that the thousands of Gates employees and hundreds of Gates teams were staying aligned with the company’s key objectives in their rush to move their own small piece of the company forward. “We manage by goals and objectives, and it’s easy for an organization of Gates’s size to dilute its efforts when teams go off in different directions,” Vigil says. “We wanted not only to help employees find the information and people they needed to complete their projects, but also to make sure that every employee’s efforts were supporting corporate objectives.”

In addition to making its information workers more productive, Gates wanted to make its IT staff more productive, too, by reducing the work involved in managing and securing 6,200 desktop computers worldwide. The staff spent approximately 320 hours each month rebuilding desktop computers and fending off viruses, spam, and malicious software.

Solution

In the past, Gates had drawn on the expertise of Microsoft Services to enable its culture of speed from an IT perspective. When Vigil and his team learned about the improved search and workflow capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Windows Vista™ operating system, they turned to Microsoft Services again, this time for help in implementing a corporate portal.

Every employee probably spends at least 30 minutes a day searching for information. The search capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Vista should reduce that to a few minutes a day. Greg Vigil Director of Global Enterprise Collaboration, Gates Corporation

The goal was to create a single browser-based point of access for locating information and expertise. This centralized portal needed to be accessible from anywhere, at any time, to internal and external users worldwide. Vigil hoped that the portal, dubbed project Unity, would give employees an easy way to search the company’s 500-plus SharePoint sites as well as enforce model business processes through the company’s FitOffice program. This program aims to apply lean manufacturing principles and factory process improvements to administrative operations. The lean approach, pioneered by Toyota, focuses on synchronizing manufacturing and other types of processes with customer demand, and minimizing or eliminating activities that do not add customer value.

The Gates IT team focused on business-side design issues while Microsoft Services consultants hammered out the technical architecture. The two teams worked together on taxonomy, setting up a proof-of-concept, development, and testing. “Microsoft Services professionals have deep expertise in Microsoft technologies as well as in delivering collaborative portals. They helped us deliver the project faster, with higher quality,” says Clark Pope, eBusiness Web Specialist, Global Enterprise Collaboration at Gates Corporation.

Built-in Search, Document Management,
and Workflow
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 proved to be an ideal foundation for Unity. It presents the same intuitive, flexible interface that users have grown to love with Windows SharePoint Services, which helps ensure users will adopt it rapidly with minimal training. From an IT perspective, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides extensive built-in capabilities, particularly in the areas of search, content management, and workflow. From a security perspective, SharePoint Server 2007 takes advantage of the authorization and authentication mechanisms of the Active Directory® service and integrates Microsoft information rights management to help ensure that proprietary information is safeguarded, even when a document is in circulation.

“We’re in the business of making high-quality hydraulic and belt products; we don’t want to be in the business of building custom search engines and collaboration technologies,” Vigil says. “It’s incredible the capabilities that Office SharePoint Server 2007 contains. We can build a whole application platform without writing a line of code. It has a more sophisticated feature set than any other portal product on the market.”

Publishing content to the portal, or to underlying SharePoint sites, is easier than ever, thanks to enhanced content management capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Master pages and page layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. There’s also support for multilingual publishing and sophisticated document workflow.

“Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it easier for one person to review and approve content posted by many contributors, without the involvement of the IT staff,” Pope says. A content manager just posts a document to a SharePoint site, and an approval workflow automatically alerts approving editors.

Expanded Search with Windows Vista
Searching for information on the Gates Unity portal is also easy, thanks to new search and index capabilities built into Office SharePoint Server 2007. For example, the new Microsoft Search engine crawls all SharePoint sites at Gates, as well as file and print servers, for information in response to a user query. Vigil’s staff improved search results by using the Site Directory tool in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to categorize SharePoint sites, and simplified the company’s site hierarchy to make topics easier to find.

“Users will be able to find information on the portal by searching by keywords or by browsing a site directory,” Pope says. “We’ll be able to crawl and index information on our SharePoint sites, as well as on file and print servers, totaling more than 7 terabytes of data—information that until now has been hidden on 55 local collaboration servers around the world.”

Windows Vista will expand search to shared folders, e-mail messages, contacts, and other resources on the Gates network. “When Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Vista are paired, our users will be able to search for information from their desktop applications without worrying about where the content is,” Vigil says. “This will open up vast reservoirs of new business intelligence to our employees, allowing them to zero in on targeted information to inform specific decisions.” 

Windows Vista will also enable Gates employees to go beyond traditional keyword searches to locate documents visually. For example, they can view documents using live icons, and stack documents by author, date, type of document, and category.

Better, Consistent Business Insights
Gates is using Excel® Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to enable information workers to publish spreadsheets to SharePoint sites. Because Excel Services dynamically renders an Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet as HTML, users can access a spreadsheet stored on Office SharePoint Server 2007 from any Web browser without needing to rely on e-mail attachments to broadly distribute a spreadsheet. In addition, it makes it easier to keep frequently accessed spreadsheets up-to-date and provides everyone with a single version of the truth.

The company is also using Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services (the reporting engine of the SQL Server 2005 database) to create business intelligence dashboards that incorporate dynamic key performance indicators (KPIs) and Gates corporate objectives. To enforce consistent business processes, executive management and division leaders create annual objectives that correlate to pillars of the Gates Business Leadership Process, a permanent model for continuous improvement at Gates. These objectives are easily accessible through the portal. What’s more, managers can log on to their KPI list in the Unity portal and see red, yellow, or green lights indicating the status of each objective. Team members scope out their work (mapped to their division leader’s annual objectives) in 90-day action plans and can readily see how close they are to meeting the action plans. “Employees have a better sense that what they’re doing every day is supporting Gates business objectives,” Pope says.

Unified Messaging with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 will improve companywide communications with unified messaging and enhanced security. Using Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging, Gates employees will be able to access their e-mail messages, voice mail, calendar, and faxes from a single inbox in Office Outlook 2007. They can access messages through a Web browser using Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access or over a telephone using a new technology called Outlook Voice Access.

Exchange Server 2007 also give Gates enhanced message security, with stronger antispam and antivirus protection, better encryption capabilities, extended data replication capabilities, and several features to simplify and strengthen regulatory compliance.

Benefits

The Gates Unity portal, combined with Windows Vista and Exchange Server 2007, is reducing wasted time along the information worker value chain, speeding time-to-knowledge and keeping employees focused on corporate objectives. Windows Vista security, deployment, and management features will help Gates reduce IT costs.

Rapid Access to Relevant Information
The Unity portal gives Gates’s 6,200 knowledge workers a fast way to pinpoint needed information, using an interface with which they’re already familiar. They’re able to locate people, information, and intellectual assets sooner, shaving minutes or hours off information searches. Because the time saved is multiplied over entire teams, Gates can recapture days and weeks in product development and customer problem resolution, thereby enhancing its culture of speed.

A faster path to knowledge not only makes money for Gates by allowing teams to roll out products sooner, but also saves Gates money by making employees more productive. “Every employee probably spends at least 30 minutes a day searching for information. The search capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Vista should reduce that to a few minutes a day,” Vigil says. “The value of 6,000 workers saving just 15 minutes a day from better information search is worth $7 million in time and talent that can be redirected to helping Gates better meet its objectives.”

Business Process Improvement with Automated Workflows
Gates has achieved enormous competitive advantage and cost savings by implementing the principles of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma in its factories. Gates is using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to implement these same principles of process improvement and waste reduction in its back-office operations.

“We’ve chosen Office SharePoint Server 2007, with its robust workflow engine, as the platform to facilitate the majority of our process improvement projects,” says Frederic Abgrall, Lean Director, Support Operations, at Gates Corporation and the business sponsor of the Gates FitOffice program. “Our initial analysis shows that by streamlining, then automating, these processes, we can expect to reduce business process lead time by up to 90 percent and processing time by up to 70 percent. We have more than 80 projects lined up for automation using Office SharePoint Server 2007, the first 20 of which will create $4 million of potential growth opportunity for Gates by allowing us to repurpose assets to higher-value activities.”

Better Alignment to Business Objectives
Gates is improving employee productivity and focus by using Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Vista to enable continuously improving models of business excellence. “At the department level, team members will know what they’re doing on short-term and long-term projects, understand how their projects meet corporate objectives, and use the built-in workflow to enable individual business processes for their departments,” Vigil says. “We’re bringing dashboards and KPIs into everyone’s activities so employees can use an easy-to-read online environment to see where they fit in.”

Pope adds that putting standards and structures in place helps employees work more effectively and consistently, and protects them from frustrating and unproductive searches for information. He says, “Employees know where to go to find information, teams, and supporting projects, and where to find the KPIs to accomplish their goals, and they have the assurance that their work is supporting the bigger efforts of the entire corporation.”

Reduced Rework and Storage
Because corporate information is so much easier to find using the Unity portal, Gates employees will not have to continually “reinvent the wheel” in researching and documenting information. The company also won’t have to store the same document multiple times on multiple servers, which will reduce hardware costs by 20 to 30 percent.

The move to Exchange Server 2007 will extend hardware savings by allowing Gates to double the number of users per mail server and increase the number of mailboxes companywide from 7,500 to 10,000 without a hardware increase. Gates will also be able to expand mailbox size to 1 gigabyte and move to less expensive storage.

Enhanced Security, Lower IT Costs
Windows Vista improvements in desktop computer deployment and management will help reduce work and costs for the Gates IT staff. “Windows Vista will give us one global desktop image across 6,200 desktop computers and 22 languages,” Vigil says. “Having a standard desktop environment that is easy to deploy, manage, and secure will reduce our annual IT costs by up to $200,000.” For example, Vigil expects that deploying Windows Vista companywide will be twice as fast as previous desktop operating system deployments, because of single-image deployment.

Enhanced security in Windows Vista will further reduce IT costs by approximately U.S.$15,000 annually, by reducing the number of desktop computer rebuilds needed due to inadvertent installation of rogue applications and spyware. The Windows Vista User Account Control features restrict users’ ability to download unauthorized software while still allowing them to use needed applications.

Easier Messaging Worldwide
Gates employees will be able to reduce wasted time even further using Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging. Employees can view voice-mail messages in their inbox without listening to them. Salespeople can phone their inbox and have e-mail messages read to them while driving. Employees can forward voice-mail messages to colleagues and manage them as they do e-mail messages. “Exchange Server 2007 will make all our employees more productive by centralizing multiple message types in one place,” Vigil says. “It’s one more accelerator in our culture of speed.”

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

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange

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 informa¬tion 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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For more information about Gates Corporation products and services, call (303) 744-1911 or visit the Web site at:
www.gates.com