Champion Technologies wanted to further improve the way it manages its tender response process. The specialty chemical company is piloting the co-authoring and offline capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 to create a standardized solution that helps employees work together to develop proposals more efficiently. The solution is expected to greatly reduce proposal-related travel costs, while speeding up the tender response process by 20 to 30 percent.

Business Needs
Champion Technologies, a premier global provider of chemical solutions for the oil and gas industry, is among the fastest growing specialty chemical companies worldwide. The company, which has 2,500 employees based around the globe, provides innovative and environmentally acceptable solutions to oil and gas challenges such as mitigating corrosion.

In the highly competitive oil and gas industry, developing quality tender responses or proposals is critical to the company’s success. The Champion Technologies Canadian Business Unit is always responding to requests for proposals from oil and gas producers, some of them as long as 150 pages, and which can take several months to complete. Each of these proposals usually involves the work of about 8 to 12 people who work from different offices and spend much of their time on the road traveling between customer and Champion locations.

In the past, team members working on the tender response process emailed large attachments back and forth, clogging each others’ inboxes. With as many as a dozen employees working on the same document, compiling each person’s feedback was cumbersome and subject to human error. Moreover, it was confusing to determine which version of the document was up-to-date. In many cases, employees worked on a tender response right up to the deadline, which competed with their attention to regular duties.

“We always were left with a nagging feeling that we could have done a bit better on each one of these proposals,” says Jeff Gonder, Canadian Proposal Manager at Champion Technologies.

Solution
To manage its tender response process more efficiently, the Canadian Business Unit of Champion Technologies is piloting a solution built with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010.

With SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010, we’re planning to create a one-stop shop for everyone to see the requirements for a proposal, add their content, and track the tasks that need to be completed. Jeff Gonder Canadian Proposal Manager, Champion Technologies

With SharePoint Server 2010, Champion Technologies is creating one, centralized location where team members can work on all documents related to a specific tender response in unique project sites. They can also view the timeline for each proposal, ongoing team discussions about the project, and the tasks that need to be completed. “With SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010, we’re planning to create a one-stop shop for everyone to see the requirements for a proposal, add their content, and track the tasks that need to be completed,” says Gonder.

The Canadian Business Unit plans to take advantage of several new features of Office 2010 to improve its efficiency. With the new co-authoring capability in Microsoft Word 2010, multiple employees can edit a document simultaneously, with indicators telling them who else is working on what section. The presence and instant messaging (IM) features in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 are also integrated with Office 2010 co-authoring features, making it easy to collaborate by seeing when coworkers are available, and discuss document changes using IM rather than getting bogged down in email.

With a mobile workforce, a key benefit for Champion Technologies is the ability for workers to update shared content while they are working offline using Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010. Workers can save content from SharePoint sites to their portable computers and work with that content without reliance on an Internet connection. Once back online, the changes employees made are automatically synchronized with documents on SharePoint Server.

Champion Technologies began deployment of SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 in March 2010, as part of the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program. As of June 2010, 250 employees are using Office 2010 in production. The company plans to complete the rollout of the new tender response process to the entire Canadian Business Unit by fall 2010. The company will expand the solution to other business units in the near future.

Benefits
The standardized tender response process is helping Champion Technologies to reduce travel costs, and create better-quality proposals more quickly.

• Reduced travel costs. In the past, teams met in person a minimum of twice during the tender proposal, once to kick off the process and then later to finish work on the proposal. Because co-authoring in Office 2010 helps employees collaborate far more easily without being in the same room, Champion Technologies expects to reduce proposal-related travel costs, saving an average U.S.$195,000 per year.

• Faster proposal development. With all tender information in one place, employees can more easily see what tasks need to be completed and simultaneously work together on a single version of the tender response. Because employees often work outside the office, being able to work on proposals while offline will also help accelerate proposal development. “With Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, we expect to reduce the time it takes to complete proposals by 20 to 30 percent,” says Gonder.

• Improved quality. As Champion Technologies standardizes its tender response process, the quality of proposals is expected to improve. This new process provides additional channels for review before proposals are delivered. “Putting a proposal together is a demonstration of the service the customer is going to get,” says Gonder. “If we’re delivering high-quality work in the form of our proposals, that’s good momentum going into the decision process when our offerings are being evaluated.”

For more information about Microsoft Office, go to:
www.office.com