Business Value Case Study - Posted 2/20/2008
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Leading Soft Drinks Company Supports Flexible Working Strategy with Sophisticated Collaborative Technologies
The “People Enablement” programme at soft drink leader Britvic aims to help employees to benefit from better remote working and collaboration. Building on top of its extensive Microsoft infrastructure, Britvic is introducing sophisticated collaborative tools, including Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. They are designed to help employees collaborate and work freely from any location. Britvic predicts people will not only achieve greater job satisfaction, but the technologies will help the business build closer relationships with partners.
Leading soft drink company Britvic attributes much its recent business success to the flexible environment it provides for its employees. Partners and customers are distributed across the United Kingdom, but this is no longer a barrier to maintaining unified, professional communications.
Since 2007, the company’s “People Enablement” programme has inspired a succession of business-process adjustments. Dave Eslick, Director of Logistics at Britvic, explains the organisation’s decision to enrich its technology infrastructure to support the programme. He says that managers wanted to help users to work more efficiently from any location, without introducing new complexities that hinder rather than support the way people work. “Employees are more mobile than ever and have to operate across multiple Britvic locations,” he says. “The People Enablement programme is designed to improve collaboration between all our employees and our third-party partners.”
Britvic, which owns brands such as Pepsi, Robinsons, and Tango, aims to find new ways to share and manage documents by using technologies such as broadband and Wi-Fi. This way, employees aren’t tied to an office to do their job. Based in Chelmsford, Essex, Britvic brand managers also spend a considerable amount of time working from brand agency offices in London. Rob Pritchard, Head of Planning and Governance, Britvic, says: “Historically, when a brand manager worked in London three or four days a week, they’d have to return to the Britvic offices to access e-mail, documents, or internal systems. People Enablement aims to reduce that need, or eliminate it altogether.”
People Enablement completes a business transformation programme that began in 2004, when Britvic identified new propositions to boost its success in the marketplace. “The time had come to focus on people—the way in which they work as individuals, within teams, and with customers and suppliers,” says Pritchard.
The technical infrastructure for People Enablement has only been in place since mid-2007, but from a user perspective it has already come to life. John Leake, Technical Architect, Britvic, says that the company gave itself a challenging deadline to introduce the technologies. “It was important that we could deploy the solutions swiftly so that users could benefit as quickly as possible. So far, it has only taken two to three months for the work we’ve done to start taking effect.”
He attributes this fast turnaround to the technologies the business has chosen to deploy. “To a large extent, rapid deployment is due to the standardised Microsoft® architecture that we have in place, from the Windows® XP desktop operating system, to the Microsoft SQL Server® 2000 database. We’re not exposed to many of the complexities companies often face with UNIX and mainframe systems, so we can be more agile.”
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“Our Microsoft solutions help to relieve the burden of having to go to the office to collect documents for use in the field, or to complete administrative tasks. Whatever people can do in the office, they can do outside the office, and they can use their time more efficiently.” |
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Rob Pritchard
Head of Planning and Governance, Britivic |
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Roadmap for Collaborative Solutions
Britvic managers believe that planned implementations of familiar, easy-to-use solutions will fit in with users’ current working practices and contribute to their growing enthusiasm for these new tools. Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, for example, is due to be rolled out to aid collaboration between virtual teams. This comprehensive content management solution will provide a single point from which users can share information easily with their colleagues. Eslick says: “The deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007 will address very real challenges in the business. It can be used to manage vast amounts of information between project teams, or to help people, such as our external advisors, work in a secure way. There’s a very clear benefits case for all these scenarios.”
Britvic also plans to deploy hosted Web conferencing service Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007. By using this, employees will engage with their colleagues in online meetings, training, and events, from any location. “We can extend communications to far greater numbers of people and start involving our partners at the same time,” says Leake.
The 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system brings with it numerous enhancements that are expected to help Britvic employees work more closely together, regardless of their location. Microsoft Office Groove® 2007, for example, helps employees to collaborate with groups of colleagues, partners, and customers without worrying about their network privileges. Groove workspaces and tools are stored on each computer, so users can work on or offline.
Delivering Unified Communications
These applications will form part of a complete unified communications infrastructure at Britvic, perhaps one of the company’s most impressive plans to date. Because Britvic has used Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2001 for instant messaging (IM) and presence awareness, employees and partners are already familiar with the benefits of locating and communicating with colleagues in real time. But as a cutting-edge company, Britvic seeks new opportunities to build on this infrastructure, and aims to upgrade to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. As Eslick explains, this is a value-based decision. “We’re not looking to deploy technology for technology’s sake,” he says. “We are making serious investments to add real value to the organisation, take complexity and cost out of IT, and boost the efficiency of our workforce.”
Office Communications Server 2007 delivers software-powered voice over IP (VoIP) that can integrate with the organisation’s existing messaging and, potentially, telephony infrastructures. It offers multiparty conferencing (audio, video, and Web), and enhanced presence and instant messaging. For Britvic users, the technology will help them communicate directly from the applications they use most.
Office Communications Server 2007 supports the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 client—offering employees a single, user-friendly interface through which they can communicate both in and out of the office using their computers or mobile devices. The plan to upgrade from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007 will offer even greater possibilities for unified communication. The Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging server helps to ensure that voice and e-mail messages, faxes, appointments, and contacts appear together in the user’s inbox.
Enhancing Employee Access to Corporate Networks
Britvic users already benefit from remote access to existing systems. Their Internet-connected Windows XP portable computers access corporate systems, such as the company’s SAP enterprise resource planning solution, from any location through a virtual private network. Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 provides users with fast and secure remote access to applications and data. Line managers can authorise sensitive capital expense requests, and sales teams can locate the most up-to-date category or brand presentations prior to meetings with customers.
“It’s about eliminating wasted time,” says Pritchard. “Our Microsoft solutions help to relieve the burden of always having to go to the office to collect documents for use in the field, or complete administrative tasks. Whatever people can do in the office, they can do outside the office, and use their time more efficiently.”
Eslick says the transformations taking place at Britvic are also encouraging a new state of mind in terms of the company’s approach to project delivery. “We’ve moved from a deployment model where we always think in terms of months or quarters, to one where we think in terms of weeks. It has taken just eight weeks to put in place changes that have had a hugely positive impact on a lot of people. Yet our financial investment has been far from huge, a totally different scale of project from what we’re used to.”
Supporting Employees in their Work
More importantly, Britvic reports an increasingly positive response from employees, who are already expressing greater job satisfaction by having the right tools at their fingertips. “There are about 1,200 people that this will affect, including customer managers and trading teams, marketing professionals, and support staff from finance, IT, and HR,” says Eslick. “As we expose people to the new tools that we plan to offer in subsequent phases, I believe they’ll be excited and inspired by the flexibility these tools will give them.”
Employees feel more connected to the organisation regardless of where they are or the hours they actually spend in the office. Brand teams, for example, can spend more time with agencies, without having to get in their cars or on a train and return to the office. “Instead of employees coming to us, we’ve extended the business to them. There’s a real feeling of being more connected to their team and the information they need to do their job.”
Leake says that most technologies will be in place over the next 12 months, but People Enablement doesn’t stop there. “It’s a new set of behaviours that we’re looking to establish within the business. The focus is mobility and collaboration, as well as ease of use. For instance, for people who use it infrequently, SAP can be daunting. In contrast, thousands of people use Microsoft applications every day. They find Microsoft solutions easy to use and rarely need training, so we’ll look at ways to integrate Microsoft with SAP as a third phase of people enablement, to make SAP more accessible for people.”
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft Server Product Portfolio, please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/servers/overview.mspx
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, please visit: www.microsoft.com/office
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2008
