4-page Case Study - Posted 8/15/2007
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Engineering and project delivery firm delivers global capabilities with Microsoft collaboration tools
Sinclair Knight Merz, a leading engineering and project delivery firm, was growing rapidly in revenues, staff numbers and locations around the world and sought to deliver outstanding client service. Over several years, the company implemented a full suite of Microsoft collaboration, server and management tools. Staff can now collaborate and share knowledge across geographical boundaries, which helps deliver the best available resources to clients. The technology also enables a more consistent approach to client service and helps reduce the cost of owning and managing IT systems.
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People who join the company often comment on how easy it is to access all the information they need through an interface they’re familiar and comfortable with |
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Peter Nevin Group Manager, Information Systems, Sinclair Knight Merz |
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Situation
SKM works with public- and private-sector clients around the world in market sectors that include: buildings and property; infrastructure; mining and resources; power and industry; and water and environment.
A technical leader across a broad range of disciplines, including engineering, science, project management, economics and planning, SKM designs and delivers a wide variety of projects to clients.
It is a firm committed to achieving outstanding client success, with high standards of safety and business ethics, a leading approach to sustainability and an open culture. In recent years Sinclair Knight Merz has upgraded the Dampier Port for Rio Tinto in Western Australia, completed the engineering design of the Anfield stadium for Liverpool Football Club, conducted major road and rail projects in Australia and New Zealand, developed a geothermal power station in Kenya and helped tackle salinity problems in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin.
SKM has headquarters in Sydney, Australia and 6,500 staff across 65 offices in 13 countries.
“The company genuinely values the skills and aspirations of its staff,” says Peter Nevin, Group Manager, Information Systems, SKM. “You may have heard it all before but, in this case, the clichés are true. The value we create for clients stems from the fact that it’s the sort of environment our staff thrive in. Sinclair Knight Merz empowers people and rewards performance.”
This approach has brought success, and with it, significant expansion. Year-on-year growth of 20–30 percent in revenues and staff numbers would pose significant challenges to any company’s business model and IT operations. Fortunately, SKM had the fundamentals right.
“Over time, the company refined its business model to make it highly scalable,” says Nevin. “We needed to make sure the technology tools that supported our business processes could handle that growth.”
As its client base grew and expanded geographically, SKM needed to grow with them. It was looking to develop and apply an organization-wide client relationship model that would help everyone in the company understand each client’s requirements, relationship with the company and the best ways to do business.
SKM draws on the capabilities and knowledge of its top people—wherever they are in the world—to deliver the best results for clients. The company increasingly found itself putting together virtual teams comprising practice leaders from all over the firm to work on client projects. To make these teams work effectively, it required collaboration and knowledge sharing tools that would allow people to work together across geographic boundaries and time zones.
“We have a global IT team of about 150: around 90 in Australia and the remainder distributed around the world, and we need to keep them all working as one team,” says Nevin.
Geographic diversity and expansion presented additional challenges for the IT department.
“For example, when we merged with a company in Santiago, Chile in 2005 we needed to make sure the standard technology environment would be relatively easy to set up in the new location and could expand to accommodate the increased number of users,” says Nevin.
“To achieve this, we needed a basic platform that would allow expansion and we had to be intelligent about evolving the platform to ensure it could grow with the company. If we wait until the business asks for added capabilities, often the lead time required is longer than is practical. However, if we add capacity prematurely, that reduces our cost efficiency. So we have to balance minimizing lead time for deploying new capabilities while maintaining efficiency.”
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The Microsoft environment helps us reduce the total cost of ownership of all our technology, from the desktop environment through to our back-end systems and databases. |
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Peter Nevin Group Manager, Information Systems, Sinclair Knight Merz |
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Solution
SKM’s Information Systems division started putting in place the infrastructure to support these growth, customer service and collaboration needs when it standardized on the Microsoft server platform in 2001. Core technologies such as Microsoft® Active Directory® enabled the company to take a global approach to managing users and server resources.
Over the subsequent years, SKM has built a collaboration infrastructure based on Microsoft server products and technologies including Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. This infrastructure has enabled collaboration across three major areas:
• Real-time and offline communication between geographically dispersed teams.
• Sharing and collaborating on documents and other data.
• Creating and maintaining a repository of corporate knowledge.
Through Office Live Communications Server, SKM has deployed instant messaging to people across the company. This allows people to communicate in real time while ensuring messages are secure and only authenticated staff members can access the system. The company is also trialing advanced features such as desktop-to-desktop videoconferencing and integrating user presence information—for example, if someone is at his or her desk, out of the office, or in a meeting—with its telephony system.
Using Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SKM had developed a variety of knowledge-sharing capabilities such as an intranet. It is currently developing the capabilities for online meeting spaces, blogs and wikis. These tools will allow virtual teams and communities of interest to contribute their ideas and work on projects together even if they are not in the same time zone. SharePoint Portal Server will also provide a repository of documents, knowledge and best practices that can be easily accessed and searched through the company intranet.
In early 2005, SKM deployed Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, a customer relationship management application that provides sophisticated tools and capabilities to manage complex client relationships. This has allowed the company to create a global database of client details and contacts that can easily be integrated with existing systems such as email and other business applications.
Benefits
By applying a range of Microsoft technologies, SKM has improved collaboration and communication across the company and taken a more rigorous approach to client interactions, resulting in efficient, responsive and customized customer service. Through familiar interfaces and powerful tools, the company has reduced its training and technology management costs; efficiencies it can also pass on to customers.
“We initially selected Microsoft software for our desktop, email and file serving environments because of its superior functionality and lower total cost of ownership,” says Nevin. “We invested in additional Microsoft technologies because there was an excellent match between the functionality the products provided and the capabilities we required to deliver our services. Also, the built-in integration between the products in the Microsoft stack made it easy to add new capabilities quickly and seamlessly.”
Better collaboration and knowledge sharing
The global availability of communication tools and a single, unified identity management system makes it easy for staff around the world to collaborate on projects and share their expertise with the rest of the company.
“Someone from the Sydney office can go to London, plug in their PC and everything works the same way it does at their desk back home,” says Nevin. “We have created one global SKM network and all the underlying communication tools work seamlessly within that framework no matter where you are.”
The practical upshot of these tools is that staff can work more efficiently together, even across time zones and geographical boundaries, and deliver better value to clients.
“We have built specialized communities of practice that deal with a particular technology or consultancy area we deliver and sometimes also a particular client,” says Nevin. “Those communities tend to be self-managing and anyone who has an interest can contribute.
“Another example is a tool we have created called SKM People. It has profiles of everyone in the company, with information drawn from our human resources system and Active Directory. If you need someone who has particular capabilities for a project, you can search through the database and find the person you need.”
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We invested in additional Microsoft technologies because there was an excellent match between the functionality the products provided and the capabilities we required to deliver our services |
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Peter Nevin Group Manager, Information Systems, Sinclair Knight Merz |
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More responsive to customers
With a unified view of customer details and interactions through Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SKM has been able to take a more coordinated approach to client relations.
“A rigorous internal approach means when we interact with clients, we know who we should be talking to, what’s the best way to deal with them and what their requirements are,” says Nevin.
“Also, the ability to find the best people for the job and make use of our global resources has had a really positive effect on our relationships with clients. Some clients deal with us across multiple countries and we can now provide a truly global service.”
Functionality from familiar tools
SKM staff can now access a wide range of collaboration, productivity and business tools throughout the company using the familiar Microsoft interface.
“With a global identity management and file serving environment based on Microsoft technology, people get a consistency and portability of access across the company,” says Nevin.
“People who join the company often comment on how easy it is to access all the information they need through an interface they’re familiar and comfortable with. With the rapid growth we’re undergoing, having an environment that’s simple to use makes it much smoother to integrate new people. It also means we spend less time and money training them how the software works.”
Scalability and reduced complexity
The Microsoft tools have demonstrated their ability to rapidly scale with the company, ensuring SKM’s technology systems were not an impediment to business growth.
“Identity management is the obvious example: if we hadn’t had the right tools in place in the beginning, we might have ended up with five or six different identity management systems,” says Nevin. “That would have made things increasingly difficult, from a technology management point of view, as the company expanded. Having a scalable technology base ensures technology is an enabler, not a problem.”
Efficient technology management
The ability to manage a relatively homogeneous technology environment has allowed SKM’s Information Systems division to deliver significant cost benefits.
“As the company grows, we are expected to deliver economies of scale in all our supporting functions,” says Nevin. “Those economies flow on to a lower cost of delivering consulting services and improved service quality.
“The Microsoft environment helps us reduce the total cost of ownership of all our technology, from the desktop environment through to our back-end systems and databases. The more we can globally manage servers, desktop systems and databases, the less it costs us to maintain those systems and improve their availability and reliability.”
The People-Ready Business.
A people-ready business is one where people can apply their unique skills, insights and experience to create new products and services, work responsively with customers and partners, and drive operational excellence in every aspect of the business. People-ready businesses support people with knowledge, practices and tools so that they can add the extra value that helps differentiate successful organizations in a competitive, fast-moving global economy.
www.microsoft.com/peopleready
Executive biography
In the eight years Peter Nevin has been Group Manager, Information Systems at Sinclair Knight Merz, he has seen the number of staff multiply more than five-fold. He now manages a team of 150, distributed around the company’s 65 offices. He was previously General Manager of IT at the National Rail Corporation and has a degree in Applied Science in Computing from the University of Technology, Sydney.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published August 2007
