Professional Services: Customer Stories

Connecting more than 700,000 qualified job-applicants with businesses around the world every day, Adecco is a global leader in staffing solutions. Adecco wanted to take better advantage of the Internet to provide people with the resources they need to realize their career goals. To drive business and increase efficiency, Adecco wanted a Web site where job candidates could submit job applications online, and that its marketing-content teams could manage without day-to-day IT support. Using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Adecco built a Web site that allows business users to create, publish, and target dynamic content to job candidates. Since launching AdeccoUSA.com in 2008, Adecco has enhanced the Web experience for site visitors, improved productivity, and driven increases in business activity and revenue through the Internet channel.

Allegis Group, the largest privately held staffing company in the United States, manages a database of more than 11 million job candidates. Its 8,000 employees connect more than 60,000 contract employees with customers worldwide. To successfully place qualified people, Allegis needed to enable recruiters to efficiently search candidate information. To this end, the company redesigned its applicant tracking system and integrated FAST™ enterprise search technology. Now, recruiters can search data from across enterprise systems to draw on a broader range of information. FAST also enables Allegis to automatically filter search results, eliminating the need to build complex search queries. With its new solution, recruiters spend less time on data entry and query building, and more time fostering long-term relationships with clients and candidates.

Blank Rome wanted to simplify attorney collaboration on client matters to ensure the highest-quality service. The law firm invested in a portal based on Microsoft SharePoint® Products and Technologies, giving attorneys access to a range of information specific to each client matter from one view. Blank Rome added extranet portal capabilities to share relevant information directly with clients. Centralizing matter information has made it easier for groups to coordinate service delivery for complex client matters and to collaborate without regard for geographic location. Extranet collaboration has accelerated the firm’s ability to respond to client inquiries and share critical information rapidly, enhancing the client experience. In 2006, Blank Rome upgraded to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, further extending the firm’s culture of collaboration to clients and co-counsel.

Gafcon, a program and construction management firm, wanted to improve accessibility to information to streamline business processes and serve its clients more efficiently. Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Gafcon implemented intranet, extranet, and industry-specific business solutions that provide employees and clients with real-time access to information from any location. With immediate insight into its business data, Gafcon is able to track and report on key information faster and more accurately, including billable hours and employee progress on client projects. This has resulted in an approximate 5 to 10 percent increase in revenue. The company also used a solution built on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to become a provider of building inspections for the insurance industry, resulting in a substantial increase in revenue in less than one year.

SharePoint360 has built a successful business providing Web portals and related technology, but its customers needed better ways to distribute and analyze mission-critical data. The company turned to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and Microsoft PowerPivot tools to create new solutions so customers can perform business intelligence tasks and share enterprise data more effectively.

Based in Washington, DC, Gallup provides management consulting, human resources, and statistical research services for customers worldwide. Gallup wanted to provide employees with enterprise search functionality to unlock the value of its corporate information and subject matter expertise. The company chose the integrated Enterprise Search functionality built into Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and gained search capabilities for people, expertise, and structured and unstructured data within an extensible global information management solution. With searchable My Sites that come with Office SharePoint Server 2007, everyone can take advantage of social networking technologies to find experts, work more productively, and boost customer service.

Critical to a successful business is the ability to understand today’s business performance, combined with the ability to predict future trends in order to effectively act on new opportunities as they arise. No exception to this rule, Gen-i’s Professional Services group needed a solution to supersede its existing performance monitoring solution, and one that would put the group ahead of the pack in terms of monitoring and measuring business performance as well as identifying trends in order to target new opportunities.

KPN is a major telecommunications and information and communications technology (ICT) provider in the Netherlands. Consultants from its subsidiary, Getronics, are frequently away from their offices, developing solutions at client sites around Europe. To improve knowledge sharing for resolving customer issues and to improve employee satisfaction, KPN and Getronics needed a way for employees to build and maintain internal relationships even when working in different locations. Getronics deployed Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to take advantage of new social-networking and document co-authoring capabilities. With these new solutions in place, the company has reduced the time to co-author consultancy reports and sales proposals by 15 to 20 percent, and employees can find knowledge experts 50 percent faster to resolve client issues more quickly.

Grant Thornton LLP needed a new document management solution that would reduce legal risk and operational costs, yet also drive business growth through secure team and client collaboration. That’s what it has achieved with Microsoft and NextPage technologies. Its C3 solution is expected to save the company millions of dollars per year, to eliminate unneeded documents, and to streamline regulatory compliance.

John Holland is one of Australia’s leading and most diversified contracting, engineering and services providers, employing over 6,000 people across the country. Established in 1949, John Holland has offices in all metropolitan and major regional centers throughout Australia and delivers projects across the country and in South East Asia.

MindTree Ltd. is a global IT Solutions company specializing in IT Services, Independent Testing, Infrastructure Management and Technical Support, Knowledge Services and Product Engineering, including R&D Services, Software Product Engineering and Wireless Products. Headquartered in India, MindTree was ranked 43rd among the leaders in The 2010 Global Outsourcing 100 by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, and in 2008 was ranked No. 1 among the Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) India Award winners for the second consecutive year.

Since 1863, Orrick has provided clients with legal services in transactional law and litigation. Within its Structured Finance practice, Orrick helps clients execute transfers of securities interests using a widely-used manual process to complete weekly transactions. To support a higher volume of business, the firm is using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, a document control and audit solution from Microsoft partner Workshare, and a digital signing platform from Microsoft partner IntelliSafe, to create an extranet for processing transactional documents. With this new system, Orrick will be able to add new clients with current resources while saving roughly U.S.$1.1 million annually by eliminating many of the costs associated with a paper-based system.

To drive continued growth, Plante Moran, a leading U.S.–based financial services firm, needed to automate business development efforts. The company sought to replace its IBM Lotus Notes contact management system with an easy-to-use customer relationship management system built on a flexible, scalable platform. After evaluating a number of packaged solutions, Plante Moran chose Microsoft Dynamics® CRM based on its intuitive interface, powerful built-in toolset, and integration with line-of-business systems and productivity applications. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Ascentium helped Plante Moran tailor the solution to automate key business functions, such as its client acceptance process. Since deploying the solution to 1,600 consultants, Plante Moran has strengthened its business development efforts and gained the agility to pursue strategic growth initiatives.

Reed Smith, one of the world’s leading law firms, was challenged to maintain close relationships with clients as it and the number of its clients grew in a highly competitive legal market. A team in one office would not always know what teams in other offices were doing with the same client. To better coordinate teams around the world, Reed Smith deployed CRM4Legal, a customer relationship management (CRM) system from Client Profiles, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Using CRM4Legal, which is based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, Reed Smith has improved the efficiency and effectiveness of its global client teams. Better, more holistic insight into client activities has naturally led to stronger, deeper client relationships. Reed Smith also uses the CRM software to guide its business development efforts and streamline its new-business research by about 30 hours each month.

Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, which employs more than 800 lawyers and professionals in 15 offices worldwide, had outgrown the labor-intensive ways in which it created budgets and monitored the firm’s performance. To help ensure continued growth and profitability, the firm turned to The Glenture Group, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to help it create budget-planning and key performance indicator (KPI) systems based on Microsoft Business Intelligence. Now, budget reports are created 10 times faster than before, and KPI data is displayed in real time rather than monthly, with instant drill-down capability to explore details. With this greater speed and analysis capability, management is spending less time administering data, and more time analyzing information to make better decisions for the firm and its clients—at a time when law firms are facing increased pressure on profits.

Each and every day, Towers Watson is entrusted with confidential client documents that must be stored in a secure, easily accessible way. To enhance the usability of its RecordsExcellence records management solution, Towers Watson is migrating the application to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Taking advantage of the software’s records management and search improvements, Towers Watson hopes to better meet its associates’ needs while enforcing companywide records management standards. More flexibility boosts user adoption, which in turn should increase the number of documents tagged for retention and the level of protection and service that Towers Watson can offer its clients. Maintaining RecordsExcellence will also be easier and less expensive, with fewer customizations and third-party components.