Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Financial Services Firm Saves Time, Improves Professional Image with Latest Software
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Financial Services
Customer Profile
Elite Payroll Services offers payroll and financial services consulting to businesses in the greater Detroit, Michigan, area. Elite currently employs two full-time employees and three contract workers.
Business Situation
Elite Payroll wanted to make better use ofits desktop software. In addition, employees who travel to multiple customer locations within the space of a day needed to make better use of their time on-site.
Solution
Elite Payroll deployed the 2007 Microsoft® Office release along with the Windows Vista® operating system and is now working more efficiently and productively, and presenting itself more professionally.
Benefits
Increases efficiency through better use of software
Saves time by streamlining processes
Provides tools for creating more compelling publications
Expedites network connections
Updates security features automatically / “The combination of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system has helped me be more productive, getmore work done, and look more professional.”
Craig Yanos, Owner, Elite Payroll Services
Elite Payroll Services, a Detroit, Michigan–based financial services firm, wanted to present an image that reflected the company’s experience and expertise without incurring the time or expense of working with an outside design vendor for marketing materials. Further, the company needed to streamline daily tasks to improve efficiency. The company offers a “CFO-to-Go” service that places employees on-site with customers, resulting in employees travelling to multiple customer sites within a single day. Elite Payroll found that potentially productive time was being lost through network logon issues, manual processes, and other delays. To address these needs, the company deployed Microsoft® Office Professional 2007 and the Windows Vista® operating system and is enjoying improved efficiency, automatic security updates, and the ability to create professional-quality documents in-house.
Situation
Founded in 2001, Elite Payroll Services currently employs two full-time and three contract employees, who provide payroll and financial consulting services to businesses in the greater Detroit, Michigan, area. Elite customers can choose from straightforward payroll services, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Consulting Services, tax and compliance management, 1099 and vendor management, and basic human resource consulting offerings.
Elite also offers a product called “CFO-to-Go” in which one of Elite’s experienced financial professionals serves as a customer’s CFOfor anywhere between four hours per month to 20 hours per week. “We bridge the gap between the bookkeeper, data entry person, and the small business owner,” says Craig Yanos, owner of Elite Payroll Services. “On any given day, my work may range from accounts payable, data entry, and check writing to business consulting, budgeting, and strategic financial planning, including making recommendations on IS services and financial reporting.”
Limited Program Proficiency
One desire of the company was to further its marketing efforts and improve its customer-facing materials and presentations. However, figuring out how to present important data to customers in a format that was professional-looking and easy to understand was challenging at times.
Elite Payroll employees were using the 2003 Microsoft® Office system for much of their daily work, and, being a financial services firm, the company relied most heavily on Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software. “Excel is our workhorse,” states Yanos. “We use tables, a lot of formulas, and multiple spreadsheets. Some of our spreadsheets are linked together because we do a lot of ‘what-if’ scenarios.” But some features of Excel 2003 were not being fully utilized by Elite employees because they did not feel confident in their understanding of the program. For instance, PivotTable® dynamic views, which provide a compelling graphical representation of data, were not widely used because they weren’t as intuitive as Elite desired them to be.
The company—which also used the 2003 release of Microsoft Office Word, the Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, and the Office PowerPoint® presentation graphics program for its business communications and collateral—needed to minimize the large periods of time that workers spent formatting various documents each day so that employees could concentrate on servicing customers.
Network Recognition and Security Concerns
Part of the tailored, consultative approach that Elite Payroll offers to its customers is to send a consultant to work on site, within the company. This usually entails joining each consultant’s wireless laptop to the customer’s network for printer and server access. Yanos recalls that this could be a time-consuming process, especially the first time he would visit a site. “It would mean going and getting someone from our client’s IT department and having them set me up with access to the network, giving me permissions, and so on,” he says. Each time Yanos went to a new site, he estimates that it would take well over 30 minutes to get set up—a huge time loss for a consultant who often visits three or four customer sites in a day. Even worse, says Yanos, “You’d have to bother the client every time … you’d quickly become annoying.” This task was multiplied when bringing several Elite employees on board with the same customer.
Needing to find a better way to manage this process, Yanos invested in a third-party solution that reduced the time involved in joining a customer’s network to approximately 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the solution created a new user on Yanos’s computer for each customer network that he needed to join, which meant Yanos couldn’t access e-mail messages, data files, and other resources stored within user profiles other than the one he was using. Yanos would be forced to stop what he was working on, log off one profile, and then log in under the necessary profile—and then repeat the process to go back to where he left off working.
Another problem was that, because some customers used a line-of-business accounting application that was not compatible with the one used by Elite Payroll, Yanos needed to utilize the Remote Desktop tool in the Windows® XP operating system to access his company’s application from one of the customer’s workstations or terminal services. This, he remembers “was a cumbersome process.”
Finally, given the confidential nature of financial services, it is important to maintain the security of customer data stored on employees’ computers. While Yanos was fairly satisfied with the security provided by Windows XP, one nagging concern was that he and his employees had to remember to manually check for and then download security updates. “Sometimes you can forget about it and not update for a few days,” Yanos says.
Solution
To confidently meet the needs of his customers, Yanos needed his company to be current with its software. So, when the 2007 Office release and the Windows Vista® operating system became available, he was eager to upgrade. “One of my clients is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, so it was a natural evolution [to move to the newest desktop software and operating system],” says Yanos. In addition to wanting to be on the same, updated versions that his customer is using, Yanos feels that being an early adopter of new technology is important for the professional image of Elite Payroll. “As a consultant, I go to many different small businesses, so it’s important to be on the leading edge of technology.”
Elite obtained Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Windows Vista Business through a reseller and installed the new products. “We put the new software and operating system on all of our computers; it was done pretty quickly and smoothly,” says Yanos. The company chose to avoid a mass migration of files, choosing to transfer historical and back-up files only as needed.
Compared with previous installations, Yanos says that the deployment of Office Professional 2007 was quicker: “When installing earlier versions of the Office system, I recall watching the bar creep across, just waiting for it to be done. With 2003, there was more manual intervention required. By comparison, the 2007 release installed very rapidly.”
Benefits
Having deployed Office Professional 2007 and Windows Vista Business, Yanos is pleased with the results. As he says, “You don't know what you don't have until you have it. Now that I have it, I don't want to go back.” He notes that “the combination of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system has helped me be more productive, get more work done, and look more professional. This allows me to spend more time with my clients and respond to their requests faster.”
An added benefit is that Elite is more efficient in the way it runs its business, as a result of using the 2007 Office system coupled with Windows Vista Business.
Increases Efficiency Through Better Use of Software Features
Yanos points to the Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface—particularly the Ribbon—as one of the best improvements in the 2007 Office system. He says, “The learning curve on the new Ribbon is very quick,” and estimates that it took him only about an hour to get up to speed.
Even better, Yanos notes that the intuitive new features of the 2007 Office system have encouraged him and his employees to take advantage of functions that may have been available previously, but with which they hadn’t been as familiar. Says Yanos, “With earlier versions, we didn’t understand PivotTables very well, but now we get it. Now, a sidebar shows you how the data is structured. I've been able to learn more about PivotTables and, as a result, I'm using them a lot more.” He also mentions that the sort, data fill, and inserting worksheet functions are all easier to use in this release.
Saves Time by Streamlining Processes
Elite Payroll is happy with the time savings it has found with the 2007 Office system. Yanos recently completed a review of 10 years’ worth of one customer’s financial data in record time using Office Excel 2007. He says, “We pulled eight key financial indicators, and we were able to put them in eight nicely formatted bar graphs.” He estimates that this sort of task previously would have taken him a few hours. With the more intuitive user interface in Excel 2007, the entire process took only 45 minutes. “Once you do the first one, then it's all set up for the rest. We were able to put all eight graphs on the same page, with the same look, showing all key indicators. The customer was very happy, and we were the hero, because we were able to deliver so quickly.”
“In terms of improved efficiencies, a lot of the time savings are in increments of minutes,” he says, “but when they all add up, we are able to save two to three hours over the course of a week. Now I can do a task in Office and Windows Vista in one or two clicks that in the past would have taken three or four clicks. As a result, I’m able to get more done in significantly less time, which makes my company look better, too.”
Provides Tools for Creating More Compelling Publications
Elite is taking advantage of the improved formatting options in Office Word 2007 and Excel 2007 to create richer, more dynamic customer-facing materials. Yanos not only finds the entire process to be more intuitive with the 2007 Office release, but also appreciates the preview function that allows him to see the results of a formatting change without implementing it and having to undo it if he doesn’t like the final effect. “The formatting in Word and Excel dresses up your document quickly and looks nice, enabling us to create more professional-looking materials” says Yanos.
“We've done our own marketing in-house, and with the 2007 Office release, we’ve been able to make our documents look more professional,” he says. Yanos notes that as in many small businesses, “there's not a lot of money to go out and make things look pretty. If we can do it in-house for ourselves or for our clients, we can save money.”
In addition, the new features of conditional formatting in Excel 2007 provide the company with the visual tools to quickly represent financial data in a new and compelling format to customers. Yanos also appreciates the ease with which he can access preset layouts by using the design templates in PowerPoint 2007. “When I need to put together a client presentation, I use the design templates and it looks extremely professional, like I spent a lot of time on it.”
Expedites Network Connections and Access to Resources
Elite Payroll employees are now able to get to work quickly at customer sites, thanks to the Domain Join feature in Windows Vista. Once an employee receives the proper authorization and a password from the customer’s IT administrator, he or she can save that setting for future use. The next time the employee visits that customer; he or she can easily rejoin the network without further assistance. Yanos has found that the Remote Desktop function he uses to connect to his company’s line-of-business application is also much simpler to use through Windows Vista. He notes, “Once you’ve done it, Windows Vista saves your settings, so you just select it from the drop-down menu.
“With Windows Vista, I can go to three or four customer sites a day and just turn on my laptop. The wireless connection knows where I am. It saves a lot of time, and I am free to focus on my customer’s needs rather than waiting to get on the network.” In addition, Yanos finds that the new Start button enables him to more quickly change his default printer when he goes to a new customer site; it also allows him to access his documents more easily.
Elite Payroll also appreciates how fast Windows Vista boots up. “When you’re sitting in front of a customer, just waiting to boot up or get to a document, 10 minutes can feel like an hour,” says Yanos. Further, the new Instant Search tool in Windows Vista helps Yanos quickly locate his customers’ files, wherever they are on his computer. Having any and all files available quickly has helped to improve the company’s customer service and response rate to inquiries.
Updates Security Features Automatically
Not least of all, Elite Payroll is benefiting from the automatic security updates available through Windows Update. Because the company doesn’t need to worry about whether employees have manually updated their systems, Yanos has greater confidence in the safety of sensitive information that he and his employees might have on their computers.
Yanos concludes, “In the end, Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system help me look smarter and respond more quickly to my clients.”
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:
Windows Vista
Windows Vista can help your organization use information technology to gain a competitive advantage in today’s new world of work. Your people will be able to find and use information more effectively. You will be able to support your mobile work force with better access to shared data and collaboration tools. And your IT staff will have better tools and technologies to enhance corporate IT security, data protection, and more efficient deployment and management.
For more information about Windows Vista, go to: