4-page Case Study - Posted 3/9/2007

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TÜV NORD Group

Global Certification Group Improves Safety and Quality Audit Efficiency by 20 Percent

TÜV NORD Group, with more than 7,000 staff worldwide, is a leader in safety and quality inspections and certifications for products, systems, and services. Currently, it faces challenges with its certification process, with staff working on incorrect certification forms and spending a lot of time manually completing and correcting audit documents. To streamline this process, ensure accuracy, and maximize the number of certifications per employee, TÜV NORD seeks to enhance the central management of forms and data with document rights management, improved search functionality, and forms with automatically pre-populated certification data. TÜV NORD is deploying the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and expects to increase certification process efficiency by 20 percent, shorten the time to issue certificates from 24 to 14 days, improve case productivity, and increase certification accuracy.

Situation

The TÜV NORD Group specializes in technical safety, environmental protection, and compliancy assessment of management systems and products with safety standards, norms, and government regulations. It is a market leader in Germany and Northern Europe and has offices in 36 countries across Europe, Asia, and North and South America. With its Systems, Mobility, Certification, Energy and Systems Engineering, Academic, and International divisions, TÜV NORD offers a wide range of consulting, testing, and servicing activities to customers worldwide. With a strong emphasis on the public good, TÜV NORD remains faithful to its principles: independence, neutrality, and integrity. The aim of TÜV NORD is to strengthen its market position through customer orientation and flexibility in the performance of its services.

The Certification Division of TÜV NORD performs safety and quality inspections, audits, and assessments to verify compliance with national and international specifications and standards. It performs approximately 18,000 inspections annually, assessing a customer’s qualifications. Once a customer has met all requirements, the division issues a domestic or internationally recognized certification.

Business Priorities

To further enhance its leading position in the market and meet its financial targets, TÜV NORD has identified a number of business priorities, including:

• Reducing certification cycle time and costs.
• Maintaining profitable growth.
• Maximizing customer satisfaction. 
• Enhancing auditors’ skills and capabilities.

In order to achieve these priorities, it was vital for TÜV NORD to accelerate the certification and audit process.

Challenges in the Certification Process

When a TÜV NORD employee initiates a certification, the system generates a file containing all documents needed for that certification. As the regulatory and legal requirements differ across a broad array of products, services, and systems, the required audit documents and forms also vary for each project. Additional documentation may be added for audits and certifications in multiple countries, as requirements and forms also vary considerably.

The Certification Department was experiencing challenges in the audit and certification processes.

TÜV NORD had difficulties ensuring that the most recent and correct certification forms and audit documentation were available to all staff. The standard size for audit teams is two auditors but for multi-site certifications, TÜV NORD can include 4 to 6 persons on a team. Because different users access and store the documents, multiple versions of the form can co-exist within the group, and certification professionals might be working from incorrect or outdated templates. In this case the staff has to go back to the document library, obtain the correct template and enter the data again, which causes delays in the certification process.

Depending on the legal certification requirements, a large number of documents may have to be completed by the staff. The more time users spend correcting certification documents and checking customer data for a specific project, the less time they have to work on other cases.

Additionally, during the certification process, TÜV NORD professionals collect customer data and often have to enter identical information—for example, customer name, logo, date of the audit—several times in various forms. Without an automated way to populate forms, employees spend a lot of time performing repetitive, non-value-added tasks. Another challenge is the initiation stage of the certification process that involves many manual steps and multiple interactions with certification agencies and customers to collect data for the audit. The lack of a well-defined, structured and automated workflow prevents TÜV NORD from having an efficient creation, review, and approval process for certification documents.

The inefficiencies in the audit department also resulted in reduced customer satisfaction. Hans-Günter Seewald, Certification Division, Member of the Management Board of TÜV NORD, comments: “The customer expects high quality and ‘unbureaucratic’ certification in a short time frame. Our current solution does not guarantee that we always meet these customer demands.” Ultimately, TÜV NORD’s image as a recognized leader of the auditing industry suffers under these process inefficiencies, limiting its ability to increase revenue.

See Figure 1 for a detailed breakdown of the process and sub-processes involved in the certification process.

Figure 1. The certification process

Critical Success Factors for the Certification Process

To improve certification data accuracy, process speed, and efficiency, Seewald identified the following critical success factors and associated key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Maximize the number of accurate certifications completed correctly the first time (KPI: Certification time and effort as percent of audits or certifications reworked).
• Accelerate audit and certification cycle time (KPI: Overall processing time, time to create certification documentation, number of cases per employee, revenue per employee).

“It is critical for TÜV NORD Group to complete the certification process at the highest level of accuracy in an accelerated time frame. This will not only strengthen our position in the market but also boost awareness of the high level of quality of our service,” says Seewald.

Solution

In order to streamline the certification and audit process, TÜV NORD deployed Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007, (including Microsoft Office Word 2007 and the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 information gathering program) and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

See Figure 2 for a description of the improvements and associated benefits across the certification process (as detailed in Process Level 1 of Figure 1).

Figure 2. Breakdown of improvements and benefits for each step of the certification process

Business Strategies and Tools Used to Improve the Certification Process

By working with the newest productivity tools from Microsoft, TÜV NORD will be able to improve its certification and audit process and achieve its critical success factors through an automated certification workflow, improved search capabilities, form and content rights management, and facilitated form creation.

Automated Certification Documentation Workflow

Certification professionals will be able to automatically initiate and track document changes from within Office Word 2007. Out-of-the-box, built-in workflow processes in Office SharePoint Server 2007 will help professionals easily schedule review and approval cycles across the group. In addition to this, Office InfoPath 2007 forms will be available to customize workflow and make automated data collection and certification documentation process more efficient.

Forms provided through Office InfoPath 2007 can be automatically pre-populated with existing customer data and relevant information from the company’s central SAP database. The solution allows for automated form creation by providing TÜV NORD users with tools that make it easy to publish content from one area to another. When users require the same data in several different documents, they will need to enter the information only once.

The XML capabilities of Office InfoPath 2007 allow form data to be automatically uploaded to TÜV NORD’s customer data systems. Information Rights Management (IRM) in Office Professional Plus 2007 helps ensure that when certification professionals connect to the central library and download templates from the central library to their local hard disk drives, those templates are automatically updated locally and on the server.

Searching and Accessing Up-to-Date Certification Data and Forms

Office InfoPath 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 will help certification professionals easily find the correct data and forms for their audits. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Centralized Report Center sites provide a single, integrated location for TÜV NORD users to find content, processes, regulatory requirements, and audit data relevant to their specific needs.

Several separate sites with associated document libraries will be used to store the audit documents. A special document library for each customer’s certification can be used for subsequent audits. By having all templates in an online, centralized library, the certification professionals can be assured of locating the most correct template to use. Using the new Open XML Format and XML Web services in the 2007 Microsoft Office system products, certification professionals can easily search and exchange critical certification data through the increased interoperability of TÜV NORD’s back-office systems, including TÜV NORD’s SAP system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005.

Enabled Content Rights Management

Office Word 2007 applies Information Rights Management to audit and certification documents to help safeguard the customer and certification data from unwanted use. The solution controls and manages the upload of certification forms and data from staff into the Centralized Report Center. Since many different users are involved in inspecting, testing, documenting, and approving the certification process, this tool helps ensure that only users with the appropriate rights can input or change certification data.

Facilitated Creation of Certification Forms

The ready-to-use Office InfoPath 2007 forms and the formatting features of Office Word 2007 enable certification professionals to quickly change the look and feel of their documents. Staff can easily create high-quality, professional-looking documents. Using the Quick Styles and Document Themes features in Word 2007, TÜV NORD employees will be able to quickly change the design and layout of audit text, tables, and graphics. Through the building block capabilities in Office Word 2007, staff can automatically copy and paste frequently used content, such as disclaimer text, customer name, or cover pages. This will make it easier to quickly and accurately create and modify certification forms and documents.

Benefits

With the implementation of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, TÜV NORD will achieve several important benefits. (See Figure 3 for detailed information on the associated KPIs for the certification process.)

Figure 3. Expected impact of key performance indicators for the certification process

Improved Accuracy of Certification Documentation

The solution will help to improve certification accuracy, as it helps to ensure that staff will always work with the most current version of forms. It also increases data accuracy because only authorized users can modify certification data. It will provide easier access to better data and will improve the staff’s ability to work with correct data and forms from the beginning. The automated certification process will reduce data input and transfer mistakes.

Increased Certification and Audit Efficiency and Productivity

The solution will increase efficiency by helping employees minimize manual data entry and locate customer information and audit documents and forms more easily and quickly. Faster access to templates in the Centralized Document Library will decrease the time needed to create certification documents. The automated process will reduce redundant data entry and accelerate document creation. The increased interoperability of back-office systems and enhanced search capabilities enable employees to integrate certification data more efficiently into forms from back-end systems. With automated workflows, the certification process will be completed more efficiently and faster pre- and post-audit.

The shorter turnaround time and greater efficiency will reduce TÜV NORD’s costs per certification and will strengthen its competitiveness as a market leader.

Increased Amount of Revenue per Employee

Time spent by employees correcting audit forms is not billable and represents lost revenue for TÜV NORD. Through an improved and more efficient certification process, the amount of rework can be reduced. Employees will have more time to work on billable certifications and will generate more revenues for the group.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

By increasing the accuracy of the certification documentation, TÜV NORD reduces the time and number of meetings it requires to review, correct, and approve the documentation with the customer. TÜV NORD will also be able to provide highly accurate and professional-looking documentation, delivering the final certificate to the customer more quickly and on deadline.

By ensuring that the most up-to-date certification documents and forms are available offline and online, and by increasing automatic population of forms with certification data, TÜV NORD will be able to improve the accuracy and quality of its audit and certification documentation. This will also allow the group to deliver certifications and audits more quickly, which will result in increased competitiveness, higher customer satisfaction, and additional revenues for TÜV NORD.

“The solution improved the quality and delivery time of our certification process, and is critical to pushing us to be in the top 10 worldwide certification companies,” says Seewald.

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 

About Business Value Assessment
This business value research study was developed by Capgemini using the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) Framework to assess the business value of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

For information on how to repeat this study for your organization, contact your local Microsoft representative or go to:
www.microsoft.com/value

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about TÜV NORD Group products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.rwtuv.com/english