Marketing Firm Reduces IT Support Calls for Remote E-Mail ...



Overview

Country: United States of America

Industry: Healthcare

Customer Profile

Headquartered in Woodbridge, New Jersey, HealthSTAR Communications is a leading healthcare marketing services network that helps its clients communicate more effectively with their customers.

Business Situation

HealthSTAR grew from 20 to 450 employees with very little increase in technology support staff. The company needed an e-mail client that required less support yet increased employee productivity.

Solution

HealthSTAR upgraded to Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003 to improve remote e-mail access, provide better online Help, and improve the filtering of junk mail.

Business Benefits

■ Reduces remote e-mail support by 90 percent, enabling IT to focus on more strategic business projects without increasing staff size

■ Saves 150 hours of help-desk support annually

■ Reduces junk mail by 80 percent, saving employees 40 hours annually | | |“The improved Help feature in Outlook 2003 answers your question 99 percent of the time. Issues only take me 10 minutes to resolve, whereas before they would take 30 minutes.”

John Szajdecki, IT Manager, HealthSTAR Communications

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| | | |HealthSTAR Communications provides integrated marketing services to major pharmaceutical companies. |

| | | |In its nearly four years of existence, the company has expanded rapidly, and its Corporate group, |

| | | |which serves the company’s 16 external customer-facing divisions, was challenged with increased |

| | | |support demands and pressure to limit the size of the support staff. To help users be more |

| | | |self-sufficient and prevent increases in IT costs and staff, the company deployed Microsoft® Office |

| | | |Professional Edition 2003. New Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 functionality such as improved remote |

| | | |access, Help, and junk-mail filtering has helped HealthSTAR reduce the number of support calls, |

| | | |improve productivity, and spend less time removing junk e-mail. According to a study done by Navigant|

| | | |Consulting, the company’s investment had a payback period of three months and a net present value of |

| | | |U.S.$3,000 per person. |

| | | | |

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Situation

HealthSTAR Communications is a leading marketing services network based in Woodbridge, New Jersey. It provides integrated services—including marketing insight, clinical marketing, field-level marketing, advertising, and promotion—to help pharmaceutical companies communicate more effectively with their customers. Established in 2001, HealthSTAR Communications has grown rapidly and consists of 17 operating divisions, one of which is HealthSTAR Corporate. The 35 employees of HealthSTAR Corporate provide IT, finance, marketing, and legal support for the 450 employees all 17 divisions.

As the company has grown rapidly from 20 to 450 employees in less than four years, the Corporate division has had to quickly integrate new acquisitions into the company. However, the division has had to do so with minimal staff increases because it functions as a cost center and faces constant pressure to keep its staff small. Challenges related to growth and staffing are particularly problematic for the Corporate division’s IT team, whose four members are responsible for providing support to HealthSTAR employees, deploying the IT initiatives required to move the company forward in its growth, and integrating services across divisions.

The Corporate IT team had a goal: to deploy new IT solutions that centralized network management and provided collaboration tools but didn’t incur additional IT staffing costs. The team could only accomplish its goal by reducing the amount of time that IT professionals spent supporting applications.

Because the divisional employees are dispersed geographically, Corporate must provide support remotely. Corporate employees were weighed down with support requests coming in by phone and e-mail, including requests for help with remote e-mail access and e-mail servers that were down.

In fact, the Corporate IT team received 20 calls per week about problems with remote e-mail access. Most HealthSTAR Communications employees were using Microsoft® Office 2000 Professional, and many of the problems were caused by the differences between the remote and workstation versions of the Microsoft Outlook® 2000 messaging and collaboration client. Employees were frustrated with learning, for all practical purposes, two different e-mail tools. “I was probably asked the question ‘Where is spell checker?’ about one hundred times,” explains John Szajdecki, IT Manager at HealthSTAR Communications.

Whenever the e-mail system went down, the IT team would receive several calls, each taking an average of four minutes to resolve. If IT technicians had to make a change to the e-mail server, either they had to wait until after business hours or they made the change during the day, which caused dozens of PCs to stop responding and triggered numerous support calls.

Junk e-mail, or “spam,” was another major problem at HealthSTAR; some employees received hundreds of junk e-mail messages every day. “Even after implementing a spam filter, some employees were receiving more than 50 junk e-mail messages daily,” says Christopher Regan, Information Systems Supervisor, HealthSTAR Communications. Most employees spent more than 10 minutes per day removing junk mail.

In summary, HealthSTAR employees faced difficulties with remote access, e-mail downtime, and junk mail. The IT team was overloaded with these and other technology support requests from the divisions. They needed to reduce the amount of time they spent on support so that they could concentrate on other IT projects and initiatives without hiring additional IT staff.

Solution

To improve its ability to grow its business while keeping a lean support staff, HealthSTAR Communications upgraded its employees from Office 2000 Professional to Office Professional Edition 2003. HealthSTAR also upgraded from Microsoft Exchange Server version 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003. Prior to full deployment, HealthSTAR initiated a two-week pilot to the Human Resources and IT departments. After this successful pilot, it deployed the software companywide, with some installations pushed out through Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 (part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software) and others installed from the server. One IT resource was able to complete three installations per hour with only 20 minutes of downtime for each employee.

HealthSTAR hoped that new functionality in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 would save its employees time, reduce the number of support calls, and improve e-mail management. That objective turned out to be completely attainable. In fact, the new features were so easy to use that many HealthSTAR employees were taking advantage of the Outlook 2003 functionality after only 15 minutes of informal training.

Furthermore, Outlook 2003 is decreasing the demands on the Corporate IT staff by reducing the number of problems with remote e-mail and unavailable e-mail servers, thereby reducing the number of support incidents. In addition, improved Help capabilities enable employees to be more self-sufficient. New functionality is also reducing the amount of time that employees spend organizing and prioritizing the messages in their mailboxes—especially deleting junk mail.

Benefits

With Outlook 2003, the HealthSTAR Corporate staff has been able to:

■ Reduce the number of support calls.

■ Give HealthSTAR employees the functionality they need to be more self-sufficient.

■ Take on new IT projects without an increase in staff.

■ Improve workforce productivity.

Reduces Number of Support Calls

According to Szajdecki, “Prior to Outlook 2003, employees who worked remotely had to learn two different kinds of Outlook—one for use in the office and one for remote access. We used to spend two hours training each employee on Outlook Web Access. Employees no longer require training on two versions because the e-mail interface is the same.”

Since HealthSTAR upgraded to Outlook 2003, the number of support calls related to remote e-mail access has declined from about 20 to 2 per week, for a savings of 75 hours per year. IT professionals can now spend this time on new projects.

In addition, because employees can store or cache e-mail locally in Outlook 2003, they can continue working when the e-mail system is down. If Microsoft Exchange Server goes down, the IT team receives only 25 to 50 percent of the number of calls it received with the earlier system. If the downtime is short-lived, the IT team receives no calls.

Enables Employees to Be More Self-Sufficient

HealthSTAR encourages employees to troubleshoot problems with Office Professional Edition programs on their own. Improved Help capabilities, such as access to Microsoft Office Online, has reduced the number of IT support calls placed. The IT group estimates that employee usage of the Office Help feature has saved 150 hours of help-desk time per year.

The new Help functionality also reduces the amount of time spent searching for an answer. According to Szajdecki, “The improved Help feature in Outlook 2003 answers your question 99 percent of the time. Issues only take me 10 minutes to resolve, whereas before they would take 30 minutes.”

Allows IT Staff to Take On New Projects

In 2001, one full-time employee and a college intern supported 25 employees. In 2004, the ratio of Corporate IT support staff to employees was 1:112. Because the number of calls and amount of time required to resolve IT help calls have decreased, the IT staff can take on new projects. Without increasing the number of staff members, the Corporate IT team supports a growing number of employees while simultaneously taking on two large companywide IT integration initiatives: implementing the Active Directory® service and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services.

Improved Workforce Productivity

The Outlook 2003 junk-mail filter has significantly reduced the amount of spam that the company receives, which means that employees spend an average of 26 hours per year less on cleaning out their mailboxes. Allison Gibbons, Accounts Receivable Specialist at HealthSTAR Communications, says, “If I was out on a Friday, I would come in on Monday and have 50 to 60 spam messages. Now I get fewer than 10 spam messages a day. I used to spend a half-hour going through junk. I can use the time I save to better complete my daily tasks and serve our clients.”

Gibbons is also using the Desktop Alerts feature, which provides immediate notification of incoming e-mail messages, to help her respond to clients faster. For example, she is often able to generate invoices for clients faster. Providing invoices to clients faster improves HealthSTAR’s accounts receivable turnover. (A/R turnover is the number of times that a company’s accounts receivables are recorded and collected during a given period.)

Internal customers are also being served better. Regan explains, “I flag the important e-mail messages that come in. They serve as reminders and help me prioritize.” Because Desktop Alerts help him resolve high-priority items faster, they can actually help him save the company money. For example, when a consultant sent an e-mail requesting a database backup, Regan was notified right away. That backup may have been delayed several hours, costing hundreds of dollars, if he had not seen the request immediately.

Employees within the HealthSTAR Corporate division have improved their searching, organizing, and prioritizing of e-mail. The time saved can be redirected to implementing additional system functionality and providing a higher quality of support, which in turn will help the other divisions better serve the company’s clients.

How Benefits Were Measured

Navigant Consulting, Inc., an independent consulting organization, performed a cost and benefit analysis to determine financial measures associated with the investment in the Microsoft Office System solution. When determining costs and benefits, the value of labor time was included.

The costs calculated include:

■ Software licensing.

■ Hardware.

■ Training (help desk, IT, and end users).

■ Deployment (strategy, imaging, add-ons, rollout, and installation downtime).

■ External professional services.

The following are some of the business improvements that were used to help calculate the benefits:

■ Time saved reviewing junk e-mail.

■ Time saved organizing and prioritizing e-mail messages.

To determine the cost of IT time, labor time was multiplied by the fully burdened hourly rate for IT staff. To determine the value of time saved, labor time was multiplied by the average fully burdened hourly rate for the employee population.

Using established cash flow analysis, standard financial data was measured over a three-year period. Calculated financial metrics include payback, the time that it takes a company to recoup its investment in the solution; net present value (NPV), the total value to the customer from investing in the solution, expressed in today’s dollars; NPV per user, the NPV divided by the number of users affected by the solution; and internal rate of return (IRR), the rate of return that the customer realizes from investing in the solution. The internal rate of return is the rate that equates the present value of cash flows to zero.

While every organization has unique considerations for economic analysis, this case study highlights key areas where economic value has been realized from the Microsoft Office 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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Figure 3. HealthSTAR estimates positive cumulative cash flow in approximately three months, based on the calculation of costs and benefits of the Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 upgrade.

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Office System

− Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003

− Microsoft Office Outlook 2003

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft Exchange Server 2003

− Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 |Technologies

− Active Directory

− Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services | |

Solution Benefits: Improved Productivity and Customer Service | |Heading |Heading |Heading | |Benefit Area |Business Metric |Technology Enabler | |Reduces support calls for remote e-mail |( 90%—Reduced number of support calls related to remote e-mail |With RPC over HTTP, remote users have improved connectivity and the same interface as when they are in the office | |Faster time to resolve items using Help |( 20 minutes—Average reduction in the number of minutes required to resolve a problem using Office Help |Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 makes Help functionality more easily accessible and provides update information within the Help task pane | | |

“I flag the important e-mail messages that come in. They serve as reminders and help me prioritize.”

Christopher Regan, Information Systems Supervisor, HealthSTAR Communications | |

Financial Benefits | |Net present value per user |U.S. $3,000 | |Net present value |U.S. $200,000 | |Internal rate of return |380% | |Payback |3 months | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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

Microsoft, Active Directory, the Office logo, Outlook, Exchange, SharePoint, Windows, Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

"NAVIGANT" is a service mark of Navigant International, Inc. Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NCI) is not affiliated, associated, or in any way connected with Navigant International, Inc., and NCI's use of "NAVIGANT" is made under license from Navigant International, Inc.

Document published April 2005 | | |

For More Information

Navigant Consulting (NYSE: NCI) is a specialized independent consulting firm that assists clients in addressing the critical challenges of business model change, regulation and risk. NCI’s Value Impact Analysis (VIA) Practice focuses on helping clients understand the value of major investments including IT investments. For more information about Navigant Consulting, Inc., email via@ or visit the web site:



For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:



For more information about HealthSTAR Communications products and services, call (732) 726-0251 or visit the Web site at:



Figure 2. At HealthSTAR Communications, Outlook 2003 delivers tools to help reduce the amount of IT support required and the amount of junk mail.

“If I was out on a Friday, I would come in on Monday and have 50 to 60 spam messages. Now I get fewer than 10 … a day…. I can use the time I save to better complete my daily tasks and serve our clients.”

Allison Gibbons, Accounts Receivable Specialist, HealthSTAR Communications | |

Figure 1. HealthSTAR Communications users have substantially improved communication with Outlook 2003, according to an October 2004 survey by Navigant Consulting.

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