Major U.S. Gas Company Boosts, Refines Information Access ...



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| | |Microsoft Office System |

| | |Customer Solution Case Study |

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| |[pic] | |Major U.S. Gas Company Boosts, Refines Information Access, Increasing Risk Avoidance |

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|Overview | | |“Productivity is the no-brainer benefit of Office SharePoint Server…. It was intuitively clear to us|

|Country or Region: United States | | |from the beginning that Office SharePoint Server would make us more productive.” |

|Industry: Energy—Oil and gas | | |Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer Service, Southern Union |

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|Customer Profile | | | |

|Southern Union Company, based in Houston, | | | |

|Texas, is engaged primarily in the | | | |

|transportation, storage, gathering, | | | |

|processing, and distribution of natural gas. | | | |

|The company has 2,750 employees. | | | |

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|Business Situation | | | |

|Southern Union needed to make its | | | |

|ever-increasing amounts of information more | | | |

|accessible and relevant to support continued | | | |

|growth, while fostering company cohesiveness | | | |

|and boosting collaboration and work | | | |

|processes. | | | |

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|Solution | | | |

|The company adopted a communications and | | | |

|collaboration platform based on Microsoft® | | | |

|Office SharePoint® Server 2007 that includes | | | |

|an intranet, team sites, and automated | | | |

|workflows. | | | |

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|Benefits | | | |

|Single information platform promotes company | | | |

|cohesiveness | | | |

|Granular security settings facilitate | | | |

|increased use | | | |

|Centralized resources foster productivity, | | | |

|collaboration, risk avoidance | | | |

| | | |Southern Union, one of the largest diversified natural gas companies in the United States, faced a |

| | | |challenge familiar to most large, fast-growing companies: the need to use information to support |

| | | |growth rather than put up roadblocks to that growth. Employees needed faster access to authorized |

| | | |information and a better way to boost security around restricted data. They needed to share |

| | | |information not only with team members within the company, but also with business partners. The |

| | | |company now has the solution it needs in Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Southern Union |

| | | |has used the software to create a comprehensive and highly successful information platform that is |

| | | |unifying employees throughout the company, increasing the speed and accuracy of collaboration and |

| | | |work processes. |

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Situation

Southern Union Company has been growing rapidly, both organically and through mergers and acquisitions. The result is one of the largest diversified natural gas companies in the United States, with operations in 17 states, more than 20,000 miles of pipeline, and one of North America’s biggest liquefied natural gas import terminals.

Paralleling the company’s growth is an increased need for workers to share documents, such as those detailing operating procedures, and collaborate on projects. Therefore, employees must be able to create, distribute, and access information quickly and easily—whether to help build a new pipeline or to provide audit documentation in compliance with the federal government’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But the means of managing information at Southern Union had not kept up with its regulatory and business requirements. E-mail was the chief means of distributing information; file shares were the chief means of storing them. An intranet portal existed, but wasn’t much used.

Poor information flow was negatively affecting the company’s cohesiveness, its security practices, and its productivity. “It was more important than ever that we act as one company, but our information management practices didn’t support that,” says Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer Service, Southern Union. “We weren’t getting information out consistently to all of our employees; we had a paper newsletter and e-mail communications, but they were not doing the job.”

Nor were file shares and e-mail helping to promote security and productivity. E-mail distribution could breed multiple versions of a document, creating confusion and making it easy for employees to work with out-of-date documents. Processes that depended on passing information through e-mail could stall or fail if e-mail messages were missed or misdirected. The lack of an effective search mechanism across file share directories and e-mail folders meant that information often couldn’t be found unless an employee already knew the document’s name or location, or both. Neither mechanism gave document creators and administrators sufficient control over who could access content.

“We needed a solution with greater risk avoidance,” says Yarbrough. “The alternative could result in business process breakdowns, or even fines, and increase our costs.”

Solution

Southern Union found that solution when Yarbrough and her colleagues attended a presentation on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

“The benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007 were so clear that we could easily communicate this to management to justify adopting the software,” says Yarbrough. “It was clear that Office SharePoint Server wasn’t just a file management system. Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Microsoft Exchange Server technologies work together in a way that would help us manage information and promote collaboration.”

One of the first purposes to which Southern Union put Office SharePoint Server 2007 was as the foundation for a new intranet information platform. The platform is a single location through which employees can access all corporate applications. It also serves as a news channel for the company, hosting headlines that employees can click through to learn about companywide information and news from other divisions. Business users create content and post the information themselves, without having to rely on the IT department.

While the intranet is a resource to disseminate information throughout the company, users can also tailor distribution of their information to specific divisions or disciplines, based on Windows Server® Active Directory® profiles. The intranet also includes a company directory and a search feature, and Southern Union is implementing the Best Bets feature in Office SharePoint Server to make search results even more useful.

Facilitating Document Management

Southern Union uses Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 together to facilitate document management. Versioning capabilities help to ensure that employees are working with the current version of an Office document, and check-in/check-out technology provides an orderly process for team members or others to collaborate on document creation or editing.

Changing the Way People Collaborate

Through its use of Office SharePoint Server 2007, the company is changing the way people at the company collaborate. Team collaboration sites provide a central location for all documentation related to a team’s work. Team calendars keep everyone on the team aware of milestones and deadlines, and task lists and contacts provide information to all members of the team.

At Southern Union, collaboration isn’t just an internal process. The company has a universe of vendors with which it works, from consulting engineering firms assisting on pipeline projects to auditors. Much of the work with these vendors calls for document sharing, and Southern Union uses Office SharePoint Server to manage this. The company creates temporary collaboration sites and gives authorized vendors access to them through a virtual private network connection with Secure Sockets Layer security. Vendors are given Active Directory credentials that limit their access to the relevant sites and even to particular documents within those sites. When the project or collaboration with a vendor is completed, Southern Union decommissions the site.

Southern Union executives have used SharePoint sites for collaboration on multiple projects with more than 100 third-party contacts and more than 10,000 documents. The sites can be set up in a matter of hours and are easy to access; executives also find it easy to update, add, and redistribute documents.

“SharePoint provides a great degree of flexibility to manage and control all aspects of the sites,” says Willie Johnson, Vice President of Business Assessment, Integration, and Compliance at Southern Union. “We maintain control of the available documents and can establish security access for users all over the country in a matter of hours.” Previously, these projects might have involved physical document reviews, sites hosted by third parties, or document exchange via DVD and e-mail.

“We have saved tens of thousands of dollars by using SharePoint sites,” adds Steve Hotte, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Southern Union.

Adding Workflow to Business Processes

Business processes that previously were bogged down or derailed by missed or misdirected e-mail messages can now be automated using workflow tools in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and the Office InfoPath® 2007 information-gathering program. The company’s first use of an automated workflow supports the tracking and approval of manually written checks for accounts payable related to a 500-mile pipeline expansion project. Employees receive automated notification of payments requiring their approval, which speeds up the flow and enables the entire process to be tracked—and later audited—from a central site.

Benefits

Through its use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Southern Union has increased employees’ sense of belonging to a unified company; added the ability to set document-level security, which makes people more confident about putting information online; and raised productivity throughout the company. In aggregate, this leads to greater risk avoidance and improved business processes.

Single Information Platform Promotes Company Cohesiveness

Southern Union wanted a platform to help draw all its employees into one, unified company, rather than functioning as a combination of acquisitions. The company’s intranet information platform, made possible by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, has contributed to that feeling of cohesiveness, according to Yarbrough.

“We designed the information platform to include the features that would keep employees coming back,” she says. “Search, news, directory, applications—we designed the platform to be a one-stop center of information. As a result, it’s a true success. Everyone throughout Southern Union, regardless of the division in which they work, has access to a common set of information and services. That’s tremendously important in helping everyone feel that they’re truly working for one company.”

Granular Security Settings Facilitate Increased Use

The personalization capabilities of the platform—the ability to restrict access to information based on an employee’s Active Directory profile—is another boon to the intranet’s use. “Ironically, the fact that not everything that goes up on the platform is seen by everyone helps to get more information up on the platform, and to make it more valuable,” Yarbrough says. “Our business users know that their information will be treated with proper security, and that encourages them to use the platform to post information that isn’t appropriate for everyone in the company.”

Furthermore, because the technology can be used to set security permissions down to the level of individual documents, Southern Union employees can implement team collaboration sites—including collaboration sites with vendors and other outsiders—with confidence that document access is controlled between team members and nonmembers. “You only see what you have access to,” says Yarbrough. “If someone doesn’t have access to a document, he or she doesn’t even see the file name in a document library. That’s a level of security we just didn’t have before. It also makes collaboration more productive because you don’t have to wade through irrelevant document lists, even in the results of a search.”

Centralized Resources Foster Productivity, Collaboration, Risk Avoidance

“Productivity is the no-brainer benefit of Office SharePoint Server,” says Yarbrough. “This was the easiest benefit on which to sell the software to management. It was intuitively clear to us from the beginning that Office SharePoint Server would make us more productive.”

And, according to Yarbrough, it has. For example, instead of printing and distributing operations manuals for its pipelines, Southern Union now makes that information available through a SharePoint document library. “First, we save money because we’re not printing and distributing copies of the document,” says Yarbrough. “Second, we no longer have to worry that employees are following an outdated version of the procedures—they always have the latest and greatest immediately available online. That, in turn, increases our risk avoidance by driving up compliance with standard operating procedures, and reduces the potential for fines due to regulatory noncompliance.”

Southern Union estimates that Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 audit processes associated with documentation have been accelerated by 30 percent through the increased productivity gained through the use of Office SharePoint Server. In addition, the related costs for filing supplies, the reproduction and distribution of documents, offsite document storage, and travel to various Southern Union offices have all been significantly reduced. The company also has seen reduced costs for external auditors, as auditors are able to access the SharePoint site to pick up the latest version of Southern Union documentation, saving time and, hence, money.

Southern Union is boosting productivity through other uses of Office SharePoint Server, as well. For example, by putting all project-related milestones, contacts, assignments, and resources in a designated collaboration site, team members can work together without having to send rounds of e-mails to obtain information.

Also, the company’s automated workflow for manual check approvals has raised accuracy by eliminating the need to rekey check data, and expedited the process by notifying employees as soon as they have checks to approve. The workflow has proved so successful that Southern Union plans to expand its use to other business processes and to automate the intranet interface to its financial system.

Microsoft Office System

The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:

office

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|“We needed a solution with greater risk |

|avoidance. The alternative could result |

|in business process breakdowns, or even fines,|

|and increase our costs.” |

|Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer |

|Service, Southern Union |

|“SharePoint provides a great degree of |

|flexibility to manage and control all aspects |

|of the sites.” |

|Willie Johnson, Vice President of Business |

|Assessment, Integration, and Compliance, |

|Southern Union |

| |

|“Search, news, directory, applications—we |

|designed the platform to be a one-stop center |

|of information. As a result, it’s a true |

|success.” |

|Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer |

|Service, Southern Union |

|“We no longer have to worry that employees are|

|following an outdated version of the |

|procedures—they always have the latest and |

|greatest immediately available online.” |

|Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer |

|Service, Southern Union |

|“We save money because we’re not printing and |

|distributing copies of the document.” |

|Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer |

|Service, Southern Union |

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|Software and Services |Hardware |

|Microsoft Office |HP ProLiant DL380 G5 |

|Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 |HP ProLiant DL585 G2 |

|Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 |HP ProLiant BL25p G1 |

|Microsoft Office Professional 2007 | |

|Technologies | |

|Active Directory | |

|This case study is for informational purposes | |

|only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR| |

|IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. | |

| | |

|Document published August 2009 | |

For More Information

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For more information about Southern Union Company products and services, call (713) 989-2000 or visit the Web site at:



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