BMW Takes Employee Collaboration to New Heights with New Communication Software

Situation

In the face of rising raw material costs and a weak U.S. dollar, the European motor industry is under greater pressure than ever before. In spite of these challenges, BMW continues to report strong earnings. In fact, the automotive manufacturer announced a 33 percent increase in pre-tax profits for the second quarter of 2006, with record figures for sales volume and revenues. This marks one of the best half-year results in the history of BMW.

The company’s success stems from its highly-efficient operations and the value that it places on its employees, who help the company maintain its reputation for high-quality engineering, luxury, innovative design, and first class performance.

BMW has a reputation for innovation that stretches to its use of sophisticated IT tools across the business. It has an in-depth understanding of advanced technologies and is adopting new products and systems in pursuit of increased productivity and operational excellence.This commitment to technology innovation is especially notable in the software infrastructure that supports more than 60,000 people in BMW offices worldwide, and 15 production sites in seven countries.

Software at BMW is required to help employees work together effectively and share information with the right people at the right time. This means that the applications used by employees—on devices such as computers, laptops, and mobile devices—must be integrated, familiar, and easy-to-use. It must also support sophisticated communications and collaboration across geographically distributed locations.

Dr. Martin Rudolph, Project Manager for Microsoft Office at BMW, says: “An office today can be any place from which people create, share, and store information, and collaborate with co-workers, partners, customers, and others on projects and business processes.”

Teams now rely on a rich collection of applications, including e-mail messaging, phone, voicemail, Web sites, and specialized collaboration tools. In addition, the manufacturer uses a proliferation of mobile devices so people can create and share information, and collaborate effectively. To get more out of this rich environment, BMW strives to establish a single, consistent work environment that is accessible to all team members—anywhere, any time.

“Communication and teamwork are the lifeblood of our business,” says Dr. Rudolph. “We depend on these two factors in all aspects of our business—from our research laboratories, which aim to develop more environmentally-friendly engineering, to the systems that we use to support our network of dealers.”

The company works closely with technology partners to test new products that can help it achieve these goals. Dr. Rudolph says: “We are looking especially closely at new versions of the software that we run in the business to understand how new features and functionality can contribute to our success.”

Solution

In early 2006, BMW accepted an invitation from Microsoft to take part in the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Following a series of presentations, a team from Microsoft Services joined BMW to fast-track the implementation of both solutions.

Two Microsoft Services project managers spent a week with the BMW team, analyzing all the requirements of the new messaging system and the Microsoft Office system, and preparing the project plan. Based on their in-depth knowledge of the software technologies and the motor manufacturing industry, the Microsoft Services professionals advised BMW on how to maximize benefits from the new technology and optimize return on investment.

In the first phase, the project team identified 100 end users for RDP. These were mostly volunteers from the IT department who were keen to see the impact of the new products on their day-to-day projects.

Benefits

Participants in the test implementation have already experienced considerable benefits as a result of the technology deployment. BMW now hopes to roll out Exchange Server 2007 and the 2007 Office system across the business, benefiting a range of employees from IT administrators to automobile-designers, and project managers to office workers.

Streamlined Communication In and Out of the Office

For BMW, the gap between working “in” and “out” of the office is now disappearing. Regardless of where they are, employees can always reach their messages and stay connected with the latest business information.

For BMW, security is also a key priority for mobile communications. In the past, security restrictions made it difficult to exchange personal information management (PIM) data with employees on the move. Now, a combination of Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Mobile® 5.0 supports secure exchange of PIM data to mobile devices.

Exchange Server 2007 comes with new features to improve communication efficiency for mobile devices. These include ActiveSync®,which “pushes” messages to employees’ mobile devicesautomatically in real time. Mobile devices are kept in sync with the users’ Outlook Inboxesbecause synchronization occurs directly with their Exchange accounts. Exchange Server 2007 also offers enhanced device and security policy control for mobile devices. Administrators can protect devices with a variety of PINs and, if devices are lost or stolen, they can quickly and easily delete data and applications remotely to protect business interests.

Precision Planning and Scheduling

Exchange Server 2007 offers a number of key administrative advantages over the previous version of the software. For example, it is now possible to set up rooms and equipment as resources without having to create a mailbox or a password for each item.

This eliminates the risk of inviting a resource as an attendee and also offers a clear “Free/Busy” view of every resource. Double bookings are avoided, while the administrative time required to add and update resources is greatly reduced. The new Calendar Concierge provides clear and easy-to-use scheduling tools that make planning meetings easier. Whenever a user sets up a meeting, Outlook 2007 automatically suggests the best available times, according to the availability of attendees and resources. This system takes account of meeting requests that have not yet been approved to help avoid time conflicts.

Alexander Nickel, Project Manager for Microsoft SharePoint at BMW, says: “In this version of Exchange Server 2007, resources are now designated in Active Directory®, which will ensure instant reservation of rooms and equipment without fail.”

Improving Project Management Through Better Information Sharing

The BMW team is also exploring the project management potential of integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Exchange Server 2007 and other critical business applications.

One plan, for example, is to integrate the BMW SharePoint Server 2007 site with the company’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This would help people collaborate on financial planning documents and access budgeting spreadsheets more effectively. It would also help employees take advantage of the workflow and version control features available with SharePoint Server 2007. Greater transparency of information would also minimize the risk of errors and budget overspend.

Reduced IT Administration

BMW IT administrators are reducing day-to-day administration with new Exchange Server 2007 features. One of these is Cluster Continuous Replication, a high-availability feature that provides disaster recovery tools that create and maintain a copy of mailbox databases. Expensive SAN systems can be reduced and backups can be performed weekly, rather than daily. This helps smaller branch offices reduce costs significantly.

The system can be restored at any time, to any specified time in the past. In addition, BMW no longer needs to use a clustered architecture for the messaging system, which saves on hardware costs.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Exchange Server 2007 offers significant cost savings. This is because it operates on a 64-bit architecture, helping BMW drive greater returns from its existing investment in Windows Server 2003 Enterprisex64 Edition. The use of 64-bit architecture enhances server capacity and performance and provides more random access memory (RAM). All storage capacity can be utilized and, as a result, BMW can support larger mailboxes for each user. IT staff can also reduce input/output (I/O) requests compared to the previous 32-bit configuration of Exchange Server 2003. Fewer I/Os and more RAM mean improved use of storage and reduced hardware requirements in the BMW data center.

Bernd Heckelmann, Project Manager for the Microsoft Exchange Server at BMW, says: “Our IT administrators can maintain the new Exchange Server 2007 messaging system and get a faster run time using less server hardware.”

Simple and Efficient Server Management

IT professionals at BMW are impressed by Microsoft Windows®PowerShell, a new command line interface shell and scripting language tool. The interface is based on object-oriented programming and the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0.

This makes it much easier and faster for an administrator to set up and configure the Exchange Server 2007 network and parameters that govern how the system is used. Most importantly, it is now easy to automate routine tasks and develop user-friendly Web-based provisioning tools.

All the basic settings in Exchange Server 2007 can be performed with the click of a mouse. Exchange Server 2007 combines the Graphical User Interface and the text-based PowerShell seamlessly, which simplifies server management at BMW.

Increased Security with Higher Availability

Due to the enhanced security features of Exchange Server 2007, BMW is willing to change its server roles. To protect its network from spam and viruses, IT staff traditionally operate an Edge e-mail server that sits in between two firewalls. The Edge server acts as a gateway, filtering SMTP connections from the Internet and protecting the safe interior of the network from spam, viruses, and malicious code.

For the first time, Exchange Server 2007 can be implemented to act as an Edge Transport Server, managing e-mail messages on the network perimeter, and filtering out spam and viruses. Edge Transport Server is responsible for all e-mail messages entering or leaving the organization. BMW will no longer need to operate a separate server product from a third party to manage these tasks. This will not only save money on licensing costs, but will make management significantly easier.

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Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

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