4-page Case Study - Posted 6/30/2009

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BorgWarner

BorgWarner Increases Productivity Through Intranet Solution, Achieves ROI in One Year

BorgWarner, a leading supplier of automotive power-train technology sought to support global collaboration across its business in a fierce market of global competition. With a desire to transform its intranet from a static repository for policy documents into a dynamic collaboration platform, BorgWarner—with aid from consultant CDW—deployed a solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Now users across product development, supply chain, manufacturing, and finance groups can better manage workflow processes, foster global team collaboration, locate documents for greater reuse of knowledge assets, and provide training resources—all of which helps bring products to market more quickly. In just one year, BorgWarner achieved its return on investment (ROI) by increasing overall office administrative productivity and reducing its intranet costs by 64 percent annually.

Situation

BorgWarner is a leader in advanced automotive products and technologies that satisfy customer needs for power-train components and systems. The company’s approach to technology has its roots in power-train product leadership that began more than a century ago. BorgWarner remains committed to innovation, with approximately 3,800 active domestic and foreign patents and patent applications pending or under preparation.

Previously, an outside provider hosted the BorgWarner intranet and published company policies and procedures, employee benefits, and similar information. BorgWarner employees retrieved that information from as many as 50 disjointed intranet sites that differed worldwide in their look, feel, function, and content. These employees had a difficult time navigating through the sites collectively. They had to call or send e-mail messages to peers to determine if the content that they had found was the most current. Those responsible for posting information often re-created existing content because they didn’t know it already existed or couldn’t find it.

“Our intranet looked like a patchwork quilt—a static environment with information that was inconsistent, redundant, and often outdated,” says Sandra Short, Director of Enterprise Business Systems for BorgWarner.

Because engineers, marketers, and others lacked any sort of self-publishing capabilities with the hosted intranet, they had to go through a protracted, multiphase process to get their information posted. The company had to pay its intranet vendor every time that it wanted to post new information on its own intranet. Admits Short, “Most of the time, employees didn’t bother unless they were posting something like a long-term policy. We were paying for an expensive hosted environment that brought very little value to the company.”

Limited, Cumbersome Collaboration

To share information, the company’s many global engineering, research, and development teams had to rely on numerous conference calls, e-mail attachments, and regular mail. Even within individual business units, collaboration often only consisted of separate spreadsheets for tracking progress. This way of collaborating in a global company introduced significant complexities across teams, internal organizations, divisions, and time zones.

“People didn’t use the intranet to collaborate at all,” says Chuck Winkler, Manager of Web Applications for BorgWarner. “It was easy to get out of synch and suffer from version-control issues. We had no globally accessible place to store and retrieve documents. Shared drives were too cumbersome for people to get to and weren’t viable for all business units to share.”

Time-Consuming Manual Processes

BorgWarner employees repeatedly carried out many manual, time-consuming processes that the intranet did nothing to support. For instance, the company’s 400 engineers located at a single technical center had to account for their time by project every two weeks. They had to print and fill out paper time sheets for project accounting, use regular mail or physically deliver them to supervisors for approval, and then mail or deliver them to accountants at BorgWarner headquarters.

After the accountants received the completed, approved time sheets, they conducted about two days of manual analysis to apply the appropriate costs to the right project, use that information to determine which engineers were eligible for overtime, and so on. “Eventually, one of our vice presidents marched me over to a stack of paper time sheets and stated, ‘These have got to go,’” recalls Short. “The entire process took more than 600 total hours of employee time per month and left the company open to data-entry errors.”

Unmet Business Needs

BorgWarner had additional issues that it sought to resolve. The company’s extranet, like its intranet, provided static information that flowed in a single direction. There was, for example, no consistent, efficient way to capture data from and share performance evaluations with suppliers. Says Winkler, “E mail was the tool of choice to collaborate and communicate with customers, suppliers, and partners, which led to version-control issues with documents. Our Global Supply Management group wanted to enhance our two-way communication to build stronger relationships and a more successful supply chain.”

The company also wanted to put in place systems that would help it curb its growing storage needs, as well as be environmentally friendly. Says Jamal Farhat, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for BorgWarner, “I also had concerns with our IT environment because we were seeing data storage growth of 30 to 50 percent each year. Finding a way to reduce that demand would have a huge impact on our future storage costs.”

Solution

BorgWarner decided to replace its existing fragmented intranet with a next-generation solution that could satisfy a range of business needs. A new solution needed to serve as a knowledge management system that provided engineers, buyers, decision makers, and others with the ability to:

• Easily publish documents on the intranet
• Effectively search for documents and other information
• Collaborate and share documents among global groups
• Increase administrative productivity and reduce costs by automating tasks
• Foster closer communication with external parties

“I wanted a solution that could serve as our intranet, our extranet, and much more,” says Farhat. “We knew that bringing together all our knowledge and information in one searchable, accessible location would help us do things that we couldn’t do before.”

To us, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 represented a powerful, flexible means to increase collaboration and to provide our users with a highly efficient and cutting-edge technological tool. Chuck Winkler Manager of Web Applications, BorgWarner

BorgWarner chose a solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We ultimately chose to go with Office SharePoint Server 2007 because it satisfied all our criteria and we felt confident in its longevity in the market,” says Winkler.

Adds Short, “The results of the review were not even close, with the Microsoft solution as the obvious choice for us. We balanced cost and ease of use with the value delivered to BorgWarner. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we not only receive a great deal of value for our investment, but we were also able to put effective, usable technology into the hands of our business users.”

Intranet Deployment

In November 2006, BorgWarner used a prerelease version of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to begin developing its new knowledge management system. After determining a structure for all the intranet sites, the company deployed a “soft launch” in February 2007, during which the new intranet ran in tandem with the old one.

In April 2007, BorgWarner officially launched its new intranet, which it branded as the Information Collaboration Environment (ICE). The primary implementation team consisted of two people to create taxonomy, system configuration, and any needed customization. For this, BorgWarner engaged an outside consulting partner, CDW. The developers established a consistent look and feel throughout all the ICE sites but also provided local security control over each site’s content. “We created the structure for each business unit and plant level, and gave those entities ‘empty buckets’ to fill with their content,” says Hardeep Singh, Senior Software Engineer consultant from CDW. An extended BorgWarner global Web collaboration team was and still is responsible for governance over each of the local sites across the world.

BorgWarner conducted initial training for ICE on a rolling, worldwide basis, breaking the training down into three training levels—basic, administrator, and advanced. The levels covered the intranet’s different layers of functionality, from navigating and searching for documents to self-publishing and developing new features. “The more our users learn about what they can do with ICE, the more valuable it is to them and to the company as a whole,” notes Short.

The company also created a site called ICE Tools that includes training documents, announcements about new features, how-to videos for specific user tasks, and a discussion board where users can post and respond to questions, problems, and issues that they have encountered. Each time a user posts a question, the system alerts 30 to 40 administrators across the company, who then provide answers when they have experience to share.

BorgWarner makes heavy use of its intranet for collaborative sites for its leadership teams or “councils.” These are groups of geographically dispersed managers who hold specific leadership roles within different business units and come together to work on shared business strategies. They use ICE to set up their meetings, work through their agendas, produce documents, and capture the decisions made and action items determined. “The ICE sites are a dynamic, living environment in which the councils can continue to operate and house the knowledge that they develop in a visible, accessible place,” says Farhat.

The BorgWarner Information Collaboration Environment (ICE) Home Page

Engineering Innovations

One department that has made considerable use of the new intranet solution is the Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) group within the Morse TEC business unit, which serves other business units throughout the company. This NVH group provides BorgWarner engineers and others with useful information and specific results from tests that the NVH group performs on their behalf.

John Skurka, NVH Engineering Supervisor for BorgWarner, recognized that the new intranet offered a better way to disseminate NVH test results. He put together an ICE site for his group’s internal customers to use. The site includes a classroom for training, audio file libraries, test reports, and so on. The NVH group posts test results on the ICE site as soon as they become available.

“People used to call me or send e-mail requesting information at least two or three times each week,” says Skurka. “Now engineers and others all over the world can go straight to our ICE site and retrieve their test results, feedback, and more without waiting for us to get back to them. It’s really valuable that our customers can obtain the necessary NVH information and answers to their questions when they need them.”

Skurka also decided that the workflow capabilities within Office SharePoint Server 2007 could help BorgWarner engineers with project decision making. Previously, engineers had to rely on e-mail and telephone messages to contact all appropriate parties and get approval for engineering decisions. Those methods were cumbersome and time-consuming, particularly when engineers tried to collaborate across the globe.

In November 2008, Skurka helped the Morse TEC Engineering Processes Team release an application on ICE to automate and formalize the business units’ worldwide engineering sign-off (ESO) process. ESO uses workflow processes for document approval, takes advantage of scheduling and calendaring functionality to coordinate meetings across time zones, and enforces version control. Says Skurka, “ESO has been readily adopted throughout the world, and it helps us reduce the time that it takes to make engineering decisions.”

Next up for the Engineering Processes Team is a new Engineering Design Guide that all engineers will need to refer to as they develop the company’s new products. The design guide will use ICE to handle workflow processes.

New Automation

BorgWarner’s Powertrain Technical Center now handles its time sheets for project time reporting through ICE. The company created an application on ICE that pulls project data—including work order and project numbers—from the company’s SAP enterprise resource planning system. The application then presents engineers with prepopulated electronic forms to fill out and send electronically through workflow processes to their supervisors from within the application. The supervisors can then approve and submit the forms to the corporate accountants with a single click. If a supervisor rejects a time sheet, the application sends it back to its original owner.

On the back end of the time-sheet solution, all the projects’ cost accounting is done automatically. The application takes the time that an individual engineer spends on a specific project and creates transactions that automatically post to the company’s SAP system.

Extranet Deployment

The company also used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to establish an extranet, which it views as a critical means of communication with outside partners. Known as ExtraICE, the extranet gives suppliers and other partners a single portal through which they can gather general BorgWarner information, supplier manuals, and performance scorecards. Says Winkler, “ExtraICE represents a huge improvement—both parties can access, update, and post documents to the same location—and it has been very well received by our suppliers and partners.”

The company also developed various partner sites and supplier tools to help with product launches, program management, and so on. ExtraICE serves both as a portal for access to those tools and as a two-way means of communication, including uploading and downloading documents and providing a record of interactions with suppliers.

Benefits

BorgWarner is proving that it uses technology to implement creative solutions for both its internal and external users. Now a research and development engineer in Japan can effortlessly brainstorm with one in New York, an accountant in the United States automatically receives approved time-tracking information from engineers around the world on a biweekly basis, and a supplier representative can instantly update and repost changes to a specification. Says Winkler, “To us, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 represented a powerful, flexible means to increase collaboration and to provide our users with a highly efficient and cutting-edge technological tool to assist in day-to-day business activities.”

The company is using the new Information Collaboration Environment to support more efficient collaboration and productivity while controlling costs. “As a result of implementing ICE, we’ve improved the quality of our decision making enterprisewide, we’re no longer wasting time and resources redoing work, we collaborate far more efficiently and successfully, our widespread knowledge is captured and stored—and we do all of this at an acceptable cost,” says Farhat.

Increased Collaboration and Productivity

BorgWarner now has a better way to support collaboration among its global groups. “We’re empowering our users through the intranet because we’ve given them an extremely effective tool that they are using to share their knowledge and extend themselves to others,” says Farhat. “As a company, we’ve always felt that collaboration contributes a great deal to our success. With employees in more than 18 countries and 60 sites around the world, making phone calls and sending e mail isn’t nearly as effective as ICE, which has really accelerated our collaboration processes.”

The previous environment permitted users to search only the content that was on the company’s intranet. BorgWarner has extended its search capabilities beyond the intranet to include other areas of the business and other types of storage devices, along with contact information for people. “ICE far surpasses the capability of the intranet search that we had before,” says Winkler. “It’s much faster now for our engineers and others to find the information that they need to do their work. The ease and efficiency with which employees can gather information has made us more effective and productive as a company.”

For example, the human resources department within BorgWarner is working with other global business units to ensure that those units are communicating correct, consistent messages to employees, with current benefit, procedural, and other resource information.

More Up-To-Date, Accurate Information

Because BorgWarner now has a solution that makes it possible for designated users to easily publish new intranet content, the company is finding that more—and more up-to-date—information is making its way into ICE. “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, the intranet has taken on a whole new level of importance at BorgWarner,” says Short. “Its information is more reliably up-to-date, it’s interactive, and employees can and do continually post information on it.”

Employees now have one place to put and find the latest information, making use of check-in/check-out functionality to enforce version control for greater accuracy. They also can use the solution to retrieve information from SAP and other back-end systems with a custom single-sign-on authentication mechanism that’s been integrated with the intranet.

One of the beautiful things … was that we were able to fund the entire project from the savings that we received by eliminating the costs of supporting our previous fragmented intranet. Sandra Short Director of Enterprise Business Systems, BorgWarner

Decreased Costs with Fast ROI

When BorgWarner implemented ICE, it provided better service and far more comprehensive functionality to its work force, yet the company’s costs fell. BorgWarner derived some of its savings from no longer having to pay hosting fees and from its new ability to self-publish content. “We’ve reduced the ongoing cost of our intranet environment by 64 percent per year,” says Short. “One of the beautiful things about this was that we were able to fund the entire project from the savings that we received by eliminating the costs of supporting our previous fragmented intranet.”

Adds Farhat, “We’ve already achieved the return on our investment. It took about a year to go from system selection through deployment, but as soon as we were up and running, we were able to shut down numerous servers that hosted the various distributed intranet sites, which eliminated the time and effort spent managing them and reduced our hosting fees. Plus, we’ve adopted a platform that makes it possible for us to do things at considerably lower cost than if we had to acquire separate supply chain or scorecard applications, for example.”

The savings don’t end there. For instance, BorgWarner estimates that its efficient new time-sheet process has helped it cut time-sheet costs by 50 percent because engineers, supervisors, and accounting staff are no longer bogged down with manual tasks.

The company also is saving on storage costs, thanks to its new content management functionality. “ICE is contributing to a nearly 15-fold reduction in the amount of storage that we need because users no longer share information through e-mail attachments, which take up network storage,” says Farhat. “The intranet gives us the opportunity to share information without having to replicate everything on employees’ desktop computers and network drives.”

The implementation of ICE also has contributed to the company’s green initiatives by reducing its paper and energy consumption.

Easy Development for Innovative Use

BorgWarner employees are using the new intranet in creative ways to solve their own business problems. “On a regular basis, we learn of new, innovative ways that people in each of the functional areas are using the technology to improve job efficiency, collaboration, and so on,” says Short. “Engineers, financial people, and others keep astonishing us with what they’ve been able to do with the technology to assist in making their jobs easier.”

Engineers all over the globe use automated workflow processes to collaborate. “The key is that, in the majority of cases, engineers and other employees can develop tailored, useful ICE solutions with the tools provided because Office SharePoint Server 2007 is so similar to other Microsoft products that they already use,” says Short.

Better Partner Relationships

BorgWarner uses ExtraICE to publish monthly scorecards for its suppliers, who log on to the extranet to view their performance and identify areas for improvement. “With the new extranet solution, we can focus ourselves and our suppliers on delivering better service, higher quality, and reduced costs,” says Farhat.
 
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