Communications Solution Simplifies Time Management at Telecom Equipment Firm

Situation

The main customers of Tellabs are telecommunications service providers in 100 countries, who require quick and effective communication from Tellabs in order to serve their own customers.

Tellabs used HP OpenMail Server as its e-mail server and Stelltor Corporate Time for calendar management. Many of Tellabs employees accessed HP OpenMail Server through the Microsoft® Outlook® 2000 messaging and collaboration client, though others used Outlook 2002 or Outlook 97. The three main issues with the environment were that it lacked integration between e-mail and calendar, offered poor remote access to e-mail, and required an unacceptable level of support because it wasn’t a standardized solution.

Lack of E-Mail and Calendar Integration

The Stelltor calendar was a totally separate application from e-mail, and there was no integration between the two. When scheduling meetings, employees such as Christopher Horsman, Director of Global Information Systems Operations, were duplicating work. “I spent a lot of time coordinating meetings. I would schedule a meeting in my calendar with a vendor, and then I would have to go back in e-mail and send a notification with the meeting time.” When scheduling internal meetings, employees had no way of viewing one another’s free and busy times, so they wasted time querying one another before they could agree to meeting times.

Limitations of Remote Access

The second issue was the inadequacy of remote access to e-mail. The product offered remote access, but that access was limited in its capabilities. Senior Training Consultant Paul Boyle says, “Remote access was not intuitive. To send a simple e-mail required multiple menus—it was very cumbersome. Users would say, ‘I’ll wait until tomorrow—it is not worth it.” Boyle estimates that it could take between 15 and 30 minutes to start a laptop computer and connect through its required security to establish a remote access connection. The inability to easily communicate from home or on the road could delay a response to a customer by hours. And because Tellabs does business worldwide, any delay in communication could cause critical decisions to be delayed.

Increased Support

The third issue that Tellabs faced was the increased support required because the solution was not standardized. IT support professionals always had to ask users which of three versions of Outlook they were using and had to choose accordingly from three separate sets of answers. Technicians also had to support the separate calendar application. When Tellabs acquired other companies, those employees were brought into the Tellabs e-mail environment, a time-consuming change that sometimes elicited reluctance from the new users. Horsman explains, “In our last few acquisitions, the employees had been using Exchange Server, and we dragged them into our program. The acquired employees had enjoyed a lot of functionality, and we took it away from them. It was ugly.”

The company realized that it needed an established e-mail and calendaring solution that provides the functionality its employees expectand need, in order to be productive in and away from the office. In addition, the solution needed to be standardized globally.

Solution

After deciding to move to a new e-mail server, Tellabs next determined that it could benefit from the tight integration of e-mail and calendar functions offered by a solution based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. To improve its e-mail functionality, calendar management, and remote communication, Tellabs:

Deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.

Upgraded to Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.

Ken Shemanske, Program Manager, managed the deployment of Exchange Server 2003 and the Microsoft Office System. Because all employees had to learn a new calendar solution and e-mail system, the IT department knew that it would have to actively guide the business through the change. Shemanske identified three keys to the success of the deployment:

Extensive communication with the internal customers.

Testing and support of the technology.

Executive sponsorship.

Shemanske worked with Tellabs’s training and communications groups to plan for the migration. He recruited 1 employee from each of the 11 main business departments to serve as a global team member on the deployment committee. These liaisons represented their departments’ concerns to the committee. In turn, they used the Message Map to prepare their departments for the change by communicating the impact of the migration on the business, so that each department knew what to expect.

With the business users involved in the planning, the deployment team was positioned to build its communications strategy for the actual migration. To prepare for deployment, Tellabs implemented the Active Directory® service and Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 (also part of Windows Server System). Deployment was scheduled in phases by floor at Tellabs facilities; in each phase, Exchange Server 2003 and Office Professional Edition 2003 were installed overnight through SMS. When employees arrived in the office in the morning, they were greeted by one of the 8 to 15 IT technicians who circulated among employees, answering questions about the changes. Training sessions conducted at 9 A.M. and 11 A.M. showed employees how to get the most out of their new solution.

Testing the new solution was the second key success factor. The IT group conducted a pilot of the solution involving 25 employees and also set up a lab for testing the compatibility of other applications with the new solution. They prepared the SMS package and tested the mailbox conversion and installation. As a result, after the installation was completed, less than 3 percent of the company’s computers required manual fixes.

The third key to success was executive sponsorship. Shemanske explains, “The executives were behind the new solution from day one. They were open to our ideas on communicating the changes and stood behind it 100 percent.”

“We wanted to deploy a tool that would address our e-mail and calendar needs and integrate those functions. We’ve put into place an established tool set that the company is using in a standard way,” says Jean Holley, Executive VP and Chief Information Officer for Tellabs. “Ourbusiness welcomed the solution with open arms and this result speaks to how well it was positioned and the success of the deployment.”

In fact, many users provided positive feedback on the deployment. Holley remembers attending a meeting at about the time of the migration. Although the meeting was unrelated to the deployment, attendees spent several minutes talking about the speed and success of the migration. The following anonymous quote is typical of the comments received, “Great job. Thanks for making me and Tellabs more efficient.”

Benefits

Using the same application for calendar and e-mail is helping employees work more effectively, both in the office and remotely.The impact that the solution is having on the business includes:

Helping to improve customer satisfaction.

Increasing productivity.

Reducing the time required to integrate acquisitions.

Resolving Help Desk calls faster.

Helping Improve Customer Satisfaction

The Corporate Support Services group is one of the key customer-supporting groups for Tellabs, managing order management for customers. “Our number one goal is customer satisfaction,” says Catherine Baldwin, Manager of Corporate Support Services. She receives more than 150 e-mail messages per day, most of which deal with customer issues. “The new solution helps me manage my e-mail much more efficiently,” Baldwin continues. Desktop alerts notify Baldwin immediately if an e-mail contains a customer situation that requires immediate attention. “Our response times have gotten better, so our customers are happier. Outlook 2003 is one of the factors that helps us respond faster to customers.”This faster response translates into higher customer satisfaction.

Over 70 percent of those surveyed within Tellabs agree or strongly agree that they are better equipped to prioritize their e-mail since using Outlook 2003.

In addition, improved remote access enables employees to check e-mail from a home or hotel Internet connection in 1 minute, compared to the 15 to 30 minutes required in the priorsolution. As a result, employees can respond more quickly to internal and external customers. Executives and sales managers can travel and stay in touch with their e-mail and calendar through Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access. The ability to easily communicate helps reduce the delay in communication to customers by hours, which is especially beneficial when working with global customers.

Increasing Productivity

The integration of the calendar and e-mail functionality is helping to increase productivity at Tellabs. Employees can view free and busy times and send a meeting request in seconds, whereas before they spent minutes scheduling meetings. Scheduling a meeting used to take several e-mail messages or phone calls; now it can be accomplished with one meeting request.The time saved organizing meetings is now spent providing a higher level of service to Tellabs customers.

Using Outlook Web Access, employees working remotely can easily check e-mail and respond to a customer, which means that they can be productive whether they are working in the office, from home, or on the road. Executives who travel to India also can easily access their e-mail and calendar, which helps them continue to make critical business decisions even when they’re away from the office.

The ability to easily check e-mail remotely using Outlook Web Access is saving Tellabs employees a total of almost 20,000 hours – additional time that they can spend with either customers or their families and friends.

Providing a Standardized IT Foundation

The success of this project helped decision makers at Tellabs realize that a solution can be deployed successfully throughout a global enterprise. The project helped dispel the idea that solutions have to be unique to each region. “We put in place a global enterprise solution,” says Jean Holley, Executive VP and Chief Information Officer.

Holley adds, “The standardization provides a foundation that we can build on when we integrate new acquisitions.” Because the solution is standardized, the time required to integrate an acquired company’s e-mail system into Tellabs and the number of issues associated with such an integration are greatly reduced. There are no more complaints that e-mail functionality was taken away from employees who went through an acquisition, and most employees welcome the communication capabilities of the e-mail solution.

Resolving IT Support Cases Faster

Horsman says, “A standardized, global communication solution requires fewer resources to support. When a user calls for help, I don’t have to determine which configuration I’m dealing with—it is the same across the enterprise.” As a result, the Outlook 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 deployment has helped the Tellabs IT staff handle more support cases per person.

How Benefits Were Measured

Navigant Consulting, Inc., an independent consulting organization, performed a cost and benefit analysis to determine financial metrics associated with the investment in the Microsoft Office System solution.

Using established cash flow analysis, standard financial metrics were measured, including 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, the rate of return that the customer expects to realize from investing in the solution.

While every organization has unique considerations for economic analysis, this case study highlights key areas where potential economic value from the Microsoft Office System can be realized. Navigant Consulting’s Value Impact Analysis (VIA) practice strongly recommends that all significant IT investments undergo a rigorous economic justification to comprehensively identify the full business impact of those investments.

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