Dow Chemical Accelerates and Cuts the Cost of Vendor ...



|Overview | | |“On every measure that’s important to us, Live Meeting is easier to use than our previous |

|Country or Region: United States | | |Web-conferencing software, and that’s why we’re seeing our people adopt it so quickly.” |

|Industry: Chemicals | | |Clay Harper, Lead Architecture Specialist, Dow Chemical |

| | | | |

|Customer Profile | | | |

|Dow Chemical is a diversified chemical | | | |

|company headquartered in Midland, Michigan, | | | |

|with 43,000 employees, customers in more than| | | |

|175 countries, | | | |

|and annual sales of U.S.$49 billion. | | | |

| | | | |

|Business Situation | | | |

|The company wanted to replace its disparate | | | |

|external Web-conferencing tools with a single| | | |

|solution that would enable easier, more | | | |

|reliable use and broader adoption. | | | |

| | | | |

|Solution | | | |

|Dow Chemical adopted Microsoft® Office Live | | | |

|Meeting and Microsoft Office Live | | | |

|Communications Server 2005, key elements of | | | |

|Microsoft unified communications. | | | |

| | | | |

|Benefits | | | |

|Increases use of external Web conferencing by| | | |

|36 percent | | | |

|Cuts the time and cost of collaboration | | | |

|Cuts deployment time by 75 percent | | | |

|Cuts through the clutter of e-mail and voice | | | |

|mail | | | |

| | | |The Dow Chemical Company was using a Web-conferencing solution to communicate with customers and |

| | | |vendors—in fact, it was using five solutions. Employees viewed the solutions as relatively difficult |

| | | |to use and unreliable. At the same time, the company was ready to adopt a unified instant-messaging |

| | | |solution across its standardized global workstations. By moving to Microsoft® unified communications,|

| | | |Dow Chemical adopted a Web-conferencing solution for the entire company that was up and running in |

| | | |six weeks and that, in its first six months, is used by 36 percent more employees than previous |

| | | |solutions were. Faster collaboration cuts the time and cost previously required to interact with |

| | | |partners. Meanwhile, the Microsoft-based instant-messaging solution facilitates faster and more |

| | | |accurate communications, which are especially important in Dow Chemical’s global infrastructure. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

Dow Chemical was no stranger to Web conferencing, and that was the problem.

At least 2,500 Dow Chemical employees had a regular need to meet with people from outside the company—people including customers, vendors, and channel partners. In the past, this need would have been filled by continual travel, bringing with it all the associated expense and wasted time. But Dow Chemical had found a better way by employing information technology to enable a solution.

“Being able to interact with customers and vendors without having to travel wasn’t seen as a big benefit anymore,” says Rod Deming, Sourcing Manager, IT Purchasing at Dow Chemical. “It was just an expectation, built into our business model, that employees could interact with people outside of the company without having to go outside of the company.”

What made the difference for those Dow Chemical employees was Web conferencing. The use of Web conferencing allowed the employees to share video and audio, approximating the benefits of meeting in person with customers and others. But there were problems.

Various Dow Chemical departments had purchased their own Web-conferencing solutions, increasing the burden on the IT department, which had to maintain them all. Moreover, the solutions were all challenging to use.

“We had to schedule conferences rather than hold them spontaneously,” says Clay Harper, Lead Architecture Specialist, Dow Chemical. “They were complex to set up and complex to use. We constantly had to explain the system to the people we wanted to conference with. Our training costs and help-desk costs were high. So was the frustration level. And because we were using these systems with customers and partners, many of our employees tended to avoid the solutions rather than risk creating a negative impression of the company.”

Web conferencing wasn’t the only collaboration technology that Dow Chemical was using with mixed feelings. A few departments were using commercial instant-messaging services for quick, informal communications within the company. But Dow Chemical officially discouraged instant messaging because, Harper notes, those communications weren’t kept within the company.

“These instant-messaging services involved taking information from within Dow Chemical and routing it out onto the Internet,” says Harper. “We didn’t want our internal conversations passed out on the Web.”

Dow Chemical’s IT organization is aligned with the company’s business strategy, and the need for agility and flexibility across the enterprise was a catalyst to make instant messaging a priority. The company was interested in the benefits that instant messaging could bring if a single, mature, and secure service could be identified.

Solution

Although the searches for Web-conferencing and instant-messaging solutions began independently, they were eventually folded into a single effort that yielded a single solution: Microsoft® unified communications.

In 2005, Dow Chemical initiated a study into external communications technologies to identify a successor to its mix of Web-conferencing tools. The company first evaluated 15 candidates on the basis of ease of use, cost, and quality of transmission. Five finalists were investigated further, and two were selected for month-long pilot programs with about 30 users each. At the end of that month, Dow Chemical had its new Web-conferencing solution: Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Office Live Meeting is offered as a subscription service from Microsoft. Dow Chemical employees go to a site on their intranet to request their Live Meeting accounts. The requests are forwarded to Microsoft, which establishes the accounts and sends the employees an e-mail message with links so that employees can download the console software they use to initiate and participate in Live Meeting sessions.

The software enables employees to schedule meetings and send invitations, which also include links to the software, to external parties. Employees also can use the “meet me now” option to quickly invite people into ad hoc meetings. Participants who choose not to download the full console can use a Web-based console to collaborate in a Live Meeting session, a feature that is particularly useful for people outside the company.

Office Live Meeting enables Dow Chemical employees to share the Microsoft Office documents on which they need to collaborate, including word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Users can even collaborate from within their Microsoft Office documents.

When an employee is reviewing a Microsoft Office document and has a question, the employee can click a button to have a “meet me now” add-in prepopulate a Web conference with the document in question. The add-in also creates an e-mail message that the employee can use to invite the document’s author—or anyone else—to the conference to address the question.

At about the same time that Dow Chemical was evaluating and choosing Microsoft Office Live Meeting, the company’s Emerging Tech-nology Process identified instant messaging as a technology that had matured to the point where Dow Chemical could consider adopting a solution. The company reviewed its options and again chose another element of Microsoft unified communications: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005.

The server software runs on a series of virtual computers in Dow Chemical’s data center, connected to a computer running Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database software. The company also makes Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 available to employees. With Office Communicator 2005, employees can access instant messaging and presence information to instantly identify whether a colleague is available, and then send an instant message.

“We’ve been very clear about how we want instant messaging to be used at Dow Chemical,” says Harper. “It’s the equivalent of meeting someone in the hall or popping your head into someone’s office. We use it for informal, quick exchanges. It is not a formal part of business processes. That’s made it easier for employees to try it out and see how they can benefit from it.”

The company is also considering extending its instant-messaging technology with Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access, which would enable employees working from home or anywhere outside the company with an Internet connection to conduct instant-messaging chats with their colleagues. Office Communicator Web Access helps provide a secure instant-messaging environment and eliminates the need to set up a virtual private network or other complex connections.

Benefits

Dow Chemical finds that the Web-conferencing and instant-messaging capabilities of its Microsoft unified communications solution have been as fast and easy to deploy as they are to use—leading to rapid adoption by employees, flexibility in working across locations, and newly found increases in productivity and effectiveness.

Increases Use by 36 Percent

Before adopting Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Dow Chemical maintained five different Web-conferencing systems for external Web conferencing—but only 2,500 employees used those systems. In the first six months after Dow Chemical adopted Live Meeting, use of Web conferencing soared 36 percent, to 3,400 users. That’s no coincidence, according to Harper.

“On every measure that’s important to us, Live Meeting is easier to use than our previous Web-conferencing software, and that’s why we’re seeing our people adopt it so quickly,” says Harper. “Our people can sign up for the service, download the software, and use it simply and intuitively. We can invite our customers and partners to conferences just as simply, and the software works. We’re more comfortable about inviting customers to Web conferences. We don’t have to worry about technical headaches that turn into an embarrassment.”

Enables More Productive Collaboration

Although Dow Chemical has not calculated the dollar value of the solution’s productivity gain, the company believes that the tool has made its employees more productive and efficient. Dow Chemical employees are expediting a variety of work processes—from supplier negotiations to customer meetings to technical support issues—thanks to Office Live Meeting.

“In the past, negotiations with suppliers and vendors involved weeks of sending documents back and forth in e-mail,” says Deming. “Now, it’s totally normal to open Live Meeting, open the document in question, and have people edit and finalize the document in the meeting. What used to take weeks could potentially be accomplished in a single Live Meeting session, or series of Live Meeting sessions.”

Because time is money, Dow Chemical finds that the faster processes enabled by Office Live Meeting save money, too. For example, the company recently experienced a serious problem with its technology infrastructure at its headquarters in Midland, Michigan. Its traditional response would have been to fly in a team of support engineers from the vendor with whom it has a service contract. Correcting the problem would have taken weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Instead, the company’s own technical staff held a series of Live Meeting sessions with the outside engineers. In addition to seeing and hearing one another, the engineers were able to jointly review supporting documents in real time through the Live Meeting console.

“Thanks to Live Meeting, we were able to engage the right people right away, without having to wait for travel schedules to clear up,” says Harper. “This was a high-profile problem that needed to be addressed quickly, and Live Meeting was an important tool to allow Dow to achieve that.”

Cuts Deployment Time by 75 Percent

Office Live Meeting isn’t just faster and easier to use than alternatives—deploying the solution was faster and easier, as well. That’s because Live Meeting, as a subscription service, didn’t require Dow Chemical to install any server hardware or software. The company’s employees were using the solution just six weeks after Dow Chemical chose it. Harper says that installing a self-hosted solution could have stretched that six-week period to six months or more.

The company’s primary effort was to ensure that its global help desk knew how to forward any incoming service requests to the Microsoft help desk, which addresses them as part of the service fee. The company also used Microsoft-provided intranet content as the basis for its employee education program.

“Normally, we spend a lot of time on creating pages like this to inform our employees about new services and how to use them,” says Harper. “The content from Microsoft significantly reduced the amount of time we had to spend on documenting the service.”

Cuts Through the Clutter

Dow Chemical employees could already communicate through e-mail and voice mail, as well as more traditional media, such as the phone. Did they really need instant messaging? The answer, according to the 15,000 Dow Chemical employees who have adopted the technology in the first six months of the deployment of Live Communications Server, was “yes.”

“Instant messaging through Live Communications Server gives you another way to communicate that’s valuable when you’re on the phone or otherwise occupied,” says Harper. “You can get a quick handle on a question. You can get an idea of whether someone is available, and then jump onto application sharing or Web conferencing with that person. When e-mail threads become clogged with too much clutter, instant messaging is a way to cut through it.”

Dow Chemical employees are also discover-ing that instant messaging combines the immediacy of the phone with the clarity of written, on-screen responses, with valuable results. For example, the company’s technology support organization spans the globe and, hence, includes employees who have various native languages. It’s easy for employees collaborating on a global support issue from different countries or regions to mishear the names of similar-sounding servers when they’re spoken over the phone. Many of those support communications are now handled through instant messaging, increasing productivity because technicians can’t mishear an on-screen response, and providing greater employee flexibility in getting projects completed.

“We’ve clearly cut down on errors in global communication because of Live Communications Server,” says Harper.

Microsoft Solutions for the Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing enterprises must compete in an increasingly global environment. Success depends on finding ever-greater efficiencies throughout the enterprise, while developing a greater agility to react to local and global market opportunities. These challenges are best answered with technology from Microsoft and its partners.

Microsoft-based solutions offer much needed value to manufacturers, who are under increasing pressure to generate greater returns on the assets that they have employed. This focus on efficiency scales across all the critical functional areas—from getting products to market faster, to streamlining the supply chain, optimizing manufacturing operations, and generating new revenue streams. 

For more information about Microsoft solutions for the manufacturing industry, go to:

resources/manufacturing

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“These instant-messaging services involved taking information from within Dow Chemical and routing it out onto the Internet. We didn’t want our internal conversations passed out on the Web.”

Clay Harper, Lead Architecture Specialist, Dow Chemical

| |

“Now, it’s totally normal to open Live Meeting, open the document in question, and have people edit and finalize the document in the meeting.”

Rod Deming, Sourcing Manager, IT Purchasing, Dow Chemical

| |

“Thanks to Live Meeting, we were able to engage the right people right away, without having to wait for travel schedules to clear up.”

Clay Harper, Lead Architecture Specialist, Dow Chemical

| |

“We’ve clearly cut down on errors in global communication because of Live Communications Server.”

Clay Harper, Lead Architecture Specialist, Dow Chemical

| |

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

|Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office Communicator 2005

− Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005

■ Services

− Microsoft Office Live Meeting

− Microsoft Services | |

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2007 | | |

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