Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Chemicals Manufacturer Replaces Open Source Solution, Cuts Desktop Issues, Boosts Productivity
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Based in Mumbai, India, Galaxy Surfactants is a leading manufacturer of specialty chemicals for personal care products. It has approximately 400 employees, 200 desktops, and 20 portable computers.
Business Situation
Galaxy Surfactants’ heterogeneous desktop environment and decentralized Linux-based messaging system lacked the security and collaborative functionality the company required.
Solution
Galaxy Surfactants chose a Microsoft® communication and collaboration solution. It deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and moved the desktop to Microsoft Office Editions 2003.
Benefits
n Increased employee productivity
n Reduced time to create collaborative documents 50%
n Provided connectivity for remote workers
n Reduced time spent troubleshooting desktops 55%
n Improved security / “We chose Linux-based StarOffice for low upfront cost. The resulting high maintenance and low staff productivity made it an expensive solution. We turned to Microsoft as an affordable, reliable replacement.”
Uday Kamat, Executive Director, Finance, Galaxy Surfactants
Galaxy Surfactants is one of India’s leading manufacturers of specialty chemicals. However, its desktop and messaging platforms did not support the information needs of its employees, who struggled to collaborate and communicate using personal computers that ran different operating systems and a decentralized messaging platform based on Linux. Desktops running a Linux-based desktop productivity suite were taking up to 65 percent of the IT department’s time, and the company’s e-mail solution left Galaxy Surfactants vulnerable to viruses. Galaxy Surfactants chose a collaboration solution based on the Microsoft® Office Editions 2003 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Employees are creating collaborative documents 50 percent more quickly, and for the first time, remote workers have access to their e-mail messages while away from the office.
Situation
In 1980, Galaxy Surfactants opened for business in Tarapur, a small industrial town located 100 kilometers from Mumbai, in western India. Beginning with two products and three customers, the company has grown to become a leading manufacturer of specialty chemicals for personal-care and home-cleaning products. Today Galaxy Surfactants has three manufacturing plants in the state of Maharashtra and three regional sales offices in India. To connect these branches, Galaxy Surfactants uses a leased-line network. It also has an international office in Bangkok, Thailand, and one in the United States, in New York. The company is a major supplier to UniLever, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate Palmolive.
Until recently, Galaxy Surfactants had a heterogeneous desktop environment that did not support the communication and collaboration needs of a rapidly growing company. Half of its 400 employees are information workers, and those employees were using two different desktop environments—either the Microsoft® Windows® 98 operating system running Microsoft Office 97, or the StarOffice productivity suite running on the Linux operating system.
That split greatly complicated file sharing at Galaxy Surfactants. Across the company, employees saved the same document in different formats. It was difficult to determine whether a colleague would be able to open or print a draft without experiencing formatting problems or compatibility issues. With no central document repository, employees stored their files on local computers, making it virtually impossible to control versioning and work efficiently as a team. Each employee ended up developing his or her own document formats and methods of generating, storing, and delivering content. The resulting inconsistent workflow delayed the production of business documentation.
Similar issues with the company’s messaging platform also reduced employee productivity, hindered security efforts, and created more work for Galaxy Surfactants’s small IT staff of six employees, who were then operating at the head office and at factories. To provide basic communication infrastructure for its employees, the company had been using sendmail, a Linux-based e-mail solution. End-users were using Microsoft Outlook Express and messages were getting downloaded to their local desktops as there was no central store of mail data. The sendmail solution does not offer remote access over the Internet. This meant that employees were bound to their desktops to access e-mail, making it extremely difficult for the 10 percent of Galaxy Surfactants’s information workers that work remotely to stay connected with coworkers and access information and documentation from the head office.
Because Galaxy Surfactants did not have a centralized directory service, the company’s IT department had to administer accounts for the messaging application (sendmail) and the operating system (Linux) separately. User policies were set at the physical location for each personal computer and there was no standardization of policies among different offices. Changing user policies and passwords was a manual process, which not only affected IT productivity, but also contributed to downtime for the company’s information workers.
“The IT team spent more than half its time troubleshooting desktops running the Linux operating system for basic issues. This reduced the time available for strategic application development,” says G. Subramaniam, Head IT and Communication Management at Galaxy Surfactants. “We had security issues as well. Because e-mail was directly transferred to employees’ mailboxes, viruses could easily travel through the Linux server and hit individual personal computers. Third-party vendors did not offer anti-virus solutions for Linux and there was no way of automatically downloading an anti-virus solution to protect the network and desktops. We also had no central tools or standard procedure for managing antivirus updates.”
Solution
Galaxy Surfactants worked with long-time technology partner Magnamious to deploy a standardized communication and collaboration solution for the desktop, based on the Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system and Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 or Office Professional Edition 2003.
Magnamious also recommended deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system. Working together, Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 provide enhanced communication capabilities for remote workers. Galaxy Surfactants enabled Cached Exchange Mode for mobile employees using portable computers. In Cached Exchange Mode, the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client works from a local copy of an employee’s Exchange Server 2003 mailbox and the Offline Address Book.
Magnamious worked with Galaxy Surfactants to deploy the Active Directory® service, a Windows Server component that provides a central repository for information about a Windows Server–based infrastructure. The company also uses the IntelliMirror management technologies within Windows Server 2003, and a key feature of those technologies, Group Policy, which provides a policy-based mechanism for managing user settings. Finally, Galaxy Surfactants deployed Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000. Exchange Server, Windows Server, and ISA Server are all part of Windows Server System™ integrated server software.
“IT administrators are using Active Directory, Group Policy, IntelliMirror, scheduled automated [Microsoft Windows] NT® backup, patch management, and security auditing tools to manage all the sites in consistent manner,” says Deepak Jhaveri, Director, Magnamious.
Magnamious used the Virtual Private Network (VPN) functionality within ISA Server 2000 to solve a connectivity issue for Galaxy Surfactants. ISA Server works with Reliance Mobile Network, Galaxy’s local cellular service provider, to create a backup connectivity solution. “Microsoft software can be integrated with other solution providers more easily than Linux can,” says G. Subramaniam. “Today, we have a solution that helps ensure there is absolutely no business loss due to connectivity issues.
“We are a growing, midsized company that has limited IT resources, and our decision had to be justified in monetary terms,” Subramaniam continues. “We needed a cost-effective, tightly integrated solution that would be easy to maintain, especially in the area of security. We felt comfortable relying on Microsoft software and a long-time Microsoft partner that understood our business needs.”
Benefits
With Windows Server System, Galaxy Surfactants is enjoying an unprecedented level of cohesiveness across the organization. With a collaboration and communication solution in place that costs less to maintain and delivers productivity-enhancing tools for the desktop, Galaxy Surfactants is saving money while growing its business.
“We are experiencing benefits across the board,” says Yogesh Kalra, Senior Manager, Commercial, International Division at Galaxy Surfactants. “From increased employee and team productivity to better, centralized IT management tools and improved security, there isn’t one area of our business that’s not more efficient than before. That puts us in an excellent position to take advantage of new business opportunities.”
Increasing Employee Productivity
Since all employees began working with the same desktop operating system and the Office 2003 Editions, they can easily share files and communicate with their colleagues. In contrast, StarOffice presented a much steeper learning curve and employees struggled with serious compatibility issues. “Employees no longer worry about whether a document will open in another format, or if a certain type of graphic will show up,” says G. Subramaniam. “Using familiar, intuitive programs like Microsoft Office Word 2003, staff members are creating collaborative documents, such as presentations, an estimated 50 percent more quickly than with StarOffice.”
This ability has affected productivity at every department where staffers are working together to develop presentations as a part of an initiative at Galaxy Surfactants called Total Productivity Maintenance (TPM). This initiative consists of three pillars: zero breakdowns, zero defects, and zero losses. TPM is significantly changing work culture at Galaxy Surfactants.
The integrated communication solution has given Galaxy Surfactants’s remote workers access to the Internet for the first time. The company ensured secure connections to Exchange Server 2003 by enabling Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) over HTTP. Now remote workers can access their e-mail messages from any Internet-capable connection without the overhead associated with a VPN. Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 in conjunction with Exchange Server 2003 and its integrated component Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, remote workers have access to all the familiar functionality of Outlook 2003—sending and receiving e-mail messages, calendaring, organizing messages, and using the address book—irrespective of bandwidth. Finally, Cached Exchange Mode reduces remote workers’ dependency on continual network connectivity.
Using the Junk E-mail Filter within Outlook 2003, employees at Galaxy Surfactants have reduced time wasted manually clearing out their inboxes. In conjunction with the Intelligent Message Filter, an important tool within Exchange Server 2003 that combats the proliferation of junk mail, this company has significantly reduced the influx of junk e-mail messages. Receiving two or three junk messages a day is now considered unusual.
Improving IT Management and Corporate Security
The IT staff at Galaxy Surfactants is now working more productively for two reasons: better, centralized IT management tools, and an improved, standardized desktop operating system. “With Linux, the IT team spent 65 percent of its time troubleshooting basic issues,” says Y. Kalra. “With our more reliable, user-friendly desktops running Windows XP Professional and the Office 2003 Editions, that figure is down to an estimated 10 percent.”
Now IT staff members are saving time by using Active Directory to manage the entire implementation, including remote locations, from the main server at headquarters in Mumbai. Administrators are using the Group Policy feature of Active Directory to set usage policies and restrictions as required to improve their control over the desktop. “Centralized management not only reduced the costs of maintaining our infrastructure, but also reduced client downtime, thereby improving our employees’ productivity,” says G. Subramaniam. “And we feel confident that with Exchange Server 2003, our e-mail security issues have been addressed. As we put in patch management based on Microsoft Software Update Services within four hours of a software update being released, our entire system is automatically updated. With sendmail, we were looking at a customized security solution that would have cost up to 1,500 Rupees per desktop, which is equivalent to more than U.S.$6,000 every year for all desktops.”
“We chose Linux-based StarOffice for low upfront cost. The resulting high maintenance and low staff productivity made it an expensive solution,” concludes Uday Kamat, Executive Director, Finance, Galaxy Surfactants. “We turned to Microsoft as an affordable, reliable replacement.”
The Microsoft Office System
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