Brebners

Accountancy Firm Solves Ongoing Productivity Issue with Quick, Easy Search Solution

Partners at Brebners, a chartered accountancy firm in London, U.K., faced issues with the search tool they used constantly to find critical information in the firm’s 250,000 document library. Brebners deployed Microsoft® Search Server 2008 Express—a free* download—and liberated partners and staff from regular indexing failures overnight. Now they can work more productively and maintain the firm’s reputation for personal customer service.

 

Business Needs

Based in London, U.K., Brebners has been providing accountancy services for more than 60 years. The firm’s policy of assigning each client to one of its 17 partners underscores Brebners’ belief that a close relationship between client and partner is fundamental to the professional customer service for which it is known. 

Now that partners and staff have a reliable search tool, we can work more productively and improve customer service.  And with virtually no effort, we have a scalable solution to grow our business Maurice Taylor Chartered Accountant and Partner Brebners

For partners and staff, this reputation rests to a large extent on their ability to quickly access the large quantity of documents that accountancy generates. Brebners engaged a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Core, to deploy an intranet portal solution in an attempt to consolidate more than 250,000 documents, spreadsheets, and scanned images. All 100 staff members rely on the portal solution’s search functionality to find information. “Search is a key service that we use to stay productive and provide efficient service for our clients,” says Maurice Taylor, a Chartered Accountant and Partner at Brebners. “We save documents to the portal continuously and we have from 5 through 10 people performing searches concurrently.”
 
The problem was that every six weeks or so, the search index failed. Taylor, who also oversees the firm’s IT environment, had to engage Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Core, to rebuild the search index. Once Core initiated the process, it took three days for the index to rebuild itself. During this time, Brebner employees could not search any documents from the system. Consequently, the process had to occur over a weekend. And in the end, there were always a couple of hundred documents rejected by the index.

“When the index failed, our productivity really suffered,” says Taylor. “I wasted hours every week helping staff members to find their documents. People lost confidence in the solution and avoided saving documents to the portal. Core had done a good job configuring the search solution; it just wasn’t scalable.”

Solution

In December 2007, when Taylor received a call from Conor Callanan, a consultant at Core, to say that Microsoft had a new product available that might solve Brebners’ problem, he was eager to try it. Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express is available as a free download and is designed to install quickly for a fast, easy search experience. And with no pre-set document limits, Search Server 2008 Express would easily handle the number of documents in Brebners’ portal.

Core was so impressed with its initial evaluation of Search Server 2008 Express that it recommended installing the beta version right away. It took one visit to install the new search software and use the out-of-the-box indexing search connector to connect to Brebners’ document library on the intranet portal. Core did not need to reconfigure any of the original search settings.

To test the new system, Core ran the old and new search concurrently for a couple of weeks. “There were two buttons on the intranet home page, but we encouraged staff to use the new search,” recalls Taylor. “People were immediately impressed with its performance. I go by the premise that if you don’t hear from anyone, it’s working. Testing Search Server 2008 Express was a very peaceful experience.”

After a few weeks, Core turned off the old search solution. Today, Brebners is running the release version of Search Server 2008 Express and every employee in the company uses it daily.

“The indexing and search capabilities of Search Server 2008 Express are excellent,” says Callanan. “It now takes six hours to index 250,000 documents, compared to three days with the old solution. We had been looking for an answer to Brebners’ problem for quite some time, and this was more than we hoped for.”

Benefits

With Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, Brebners solved an ongoing and serious productivity issue overnight. “Now that partners and staff have a powerful, reliable search tool, we can work more productively and improve customer service,” says Taylor. “And with virtually no effort, we have a scalable solution to grow our business.”  

Improved Performance

Since deployment, Search Server 2008 Express has performed reliably. The solution returns documents more quickly, the indexing has never failed, and the tool performs an incremental update every 10 minutes, instead of every hour, as with the previous solution. All documents have been indexed successfully. And should the index fail, it is not necessary to wait until the entire index is completed to get back to work. Once a document is re-indexed, it’s ready and available to be searched.

Increased Productivity

Now everyone at Brebners saves all their documents into the firm’s portal document library and with everyone using Search Server 2008 Express to quickly and easily retrieve their documents, productivity is up. People no longer wait an hour after saving their documents before being able to use them again. No one is inconvenienced by an index failure. The IT department is saving hours every week to focus on his clients because he’s not dealing with search issues.  “The new system is reliable, which has improved productivity and confidence in the system,” adds Tracy Waller, Office Administrator at Brebners.

Greater Scalability

“Search Server 2008 Express couldn’t have arrived at a better time. We are merging with another practice and will be adding more users and documents to the system,” says Taylor. “We are confident that Search Server 2008 Express will scale to meet our growth objectives, at the same time ensuring that everyone can maintain the level of service for which Brebners is known.” 

 

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