Coating Excellence International (CEI) manufactures high-quality, flexible-packaging products using environmentally friendly practices. To continue to enhance its quality and efficiency, CEI needed to provide its shop-floor operators and business decision makers with real-time production metrics and analysis tools in a solution that was quick to deploy and easy to manage with limited resources. It upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics® AX 4.0, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, and integrated those with its shop-floor application. As a result CEI enhanced its decision making and customer management tools. And by signing a Microsoft Volume Licensing Enterprise Agreement, it cut software license acquisition and management costs, set a predictable licensing cost per desktop, and gained Software Assurance benefits.

Though Brigham Young University’s (BYU’s) Religious Education Computer Support maintains more than 300 PCs, only one full-time person, with a few additional part-time personnel, oversees the operation. The IT systems administrator expects reliability and high functionality in the organization’s chosen technology. He also needs solutions that can provide headroom to accommodate the department’s future growth. Part of the answer was found with the migration to Windows Vista.

Trimble Mobile Resource Management (MRM) provides solutions that help businesses manage mobile workers and assets. Two years ago, the development group within Trimble MRM did not have an integrated tool set for application life-cycle management. Instead, developers used a mixed set of tools and ad-hoc processes, which limited developer productivity, made it hard to accurately gauge progress, and hampered collaboration with the company’s quality assurance (QA) group. By adopting Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008, the Trimble MRM development group improved all aspects of application life-cycle management—from project estimation and progress tracking to software quality and collaboration with the QA group. Developers are 30 percent more productive, code reuse is strong, and improved visibility into project status and progress are benefiting all stakeholders.

The Utusan Group publishes Malay language newspapers Utusan Malaysia, Mingguan Malaysia and Kosmo. The company had been using freeware e-mail application Postfix for a number of years. However it encountered reliability issues and decided to replace the system. After evaluating various solutions, Utusan chose Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 as its enterprise messaging system due to its extensive capabilities and high reliability. Exchange Server 2007 has enhanced the productivity of Utusan by using Unified Messaging to integrate e-mail, voice mail and fax services into a single messaging client. Utusan’s journalists can access information from Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 and use Microsoft® Office Outlook® Web Access on their mobile devices. With Windows® Mobile devices, Utusan staff can receive e-mail messages, make calendar updates, get contacts and create new tasks.

When two partners built a chain of four pharmacies near Kansas City, Missouri, time demands rose as fast as square footage. The largest store offered 10,000 SKUs to 900 customers a day. But every pharmacy’s albatross—accurately invoicing insurance companies and reconciling piecemeal payments—took up to 20 hours of staff time per store each month. Then nursing homes and customers had to be invoiced for the remainders. To tame the paperwork, partners selected Microsoft Dynamics® Retail Management System, Nova Libra Pharmacy POS, and Speed Script’s Pharmacy Management System. Task times shrunk, billing accuracy hit nearly 100 percent, and customers praised faster lines. But an unexpected bonus appeared. When partners agreed to divide the chain, accounts receivable were clear to the penny, customer lists showed preferred buying habits, and stock levels reported by store were impeccable.

North Shore Medical Center in Massachusetts ran its clinical technology system for doctors and nurses on aging computer hardware and software that frustrated medical professionals, cost the IT department precious time and resources to maintain, and inhibited the ability to respond to new business requirements. In its place, the healthcare provider adopted a thin-client solution of desktop and mobile units, which uses Microsoft® technologies. The results: Logon takes seconds instead of minutes, and reliability is improved. Hardware and software costs are cut by 30 percent; help-desk calls are expected to decline 50 percent; and total cost of ownership is down by about 30 percent. Best of all, the solution gives doctors and nurses more time to talk with each other and with patients, enhancing the quality of care.

CSG Systems needed to create a more agile front end for the mainframe-based applications it uses to provide customer care, order management, and billing solutions for the convergent cable, direct broadcast satellite and communications industries. As this industry becomes more dynamic and competitive, CSG customers need the ability to more rapidly change the pricing and combination of service packages offered to customers. The company used Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 to create its Business Services Platform. The solution which CSG has just begun offering, will give customers agility to swiftly react to market needs, and provide a better view of the business as its integrated Business Services Platform displays the information in one screen that used to require a user to traverse through countless mainframe terminal screens.

HOK, one of the top architectural firms in the world, was seeking a better approach to collaboration for its 2,600-plus employees worldwide, many of whom are mobile, and the hundreds of partners, vendors, and consultants with whom they work on a daily basis. The firm also wanted desktop productivity tools that would thoroughly integrate into its collaboration solution. HOK decided to convert its intranet platform from Cold Fusion to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, and to migrate its client computing systems from Microsoft Office 2003 software to the 2007 Office release. With the new software deployed, mobile users and others are collaborating more intuitively, especially through shared calendaring and presence awareness, and are faster at creating presentations and worksheets. HOK also is enjoying the bandwidth economies of files that are up to 90 percent smaller.

NuStar Energy began operations in 2007 in San Antonio, Texas, after separating from parent company Valero Energy. Management was under pressure to rebrand operations while ensuring that customers experience continuous service. NuStar had to choose technology that would provide immediate operational efficiency and support long-term corporate goals. NuStar Energy also needed a licensing strategy that would deliver initial cost savings and long-term benefits. To achieve these goals, NuStar Energy acquired an integrated Microsoft® solution through a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that covers the latest Microsoft desktop software and server products, as well as ongoing maintenance benefits. NuStar Energy’s IT infrastructure was operational in less than six months and now has the communication, collaboration, and IT management capabilities it needs to support a growing global organization.

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, MaximumASP is a Web-hosting company that prides itself on its innovative offerings and outstanding customer service. The company’s growth, however, led to a proliferation of servers that took increasing amounts of time to provision and manage, pulling staff away from researching new services and hurting business agility. MaximumASP is now using the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology to consolidate servers and offer more flexible and competitive products, such as high-availability clusters and self-service server provisioning. The company anticipates saving U.S.$350,000 in hardware costs by virtualizing 200 servers, in addition to saving on power and IT management costs. MaximumASP is also using Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to streamline server deployment and management.