Customer Solution Case Study
/ / National Wholesale Distributor Boosts IT and User Productivity with Desktop Upgrade
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing & Distribution
Customer Profile
Based in Des Plains, IL, United Stationers Inc. is the largest broad line wholesale distributor of business products in the U.S., with net sales of approximately $4 billion.
Business Situation
United Stationers wanted to better utilize technology to help improve business functions and increase the organization’s overall productivity.
Solution
Upgrading to Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003, United Stationers has increased user and operational efficiency while reducing demand on IT support through creation of better managed network.
Benefits
n Standardization helps gain early ROI
n Software reliability and stability cuts demand on IT department
n Office Resource Kit eases transfer of personalization settings in Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003
n The "Install local file" option mitigates risk of losing end-user data
n Increased overall user productivity and operational efficiency / “Office 2003 has put our team in a better position to focus technology in a way that makes the people of United Stationers more productive and more adept at using and managing company information.”
Frank Arvidson, Manager of Office and Mobile Computing, United Stationers Inc.
United Stationers Inc. aims to provide its employees the most up-to-date and robust software available in a dynamic and changing business environment. A series of acquisitions and multiple hardware leases made it difficult for the company’s IT department to standardize its desktop infrastructure. Taking advantage of a hardware refresh cycle to initiate an asset purchase program, United Stationers upgraded its desktop systems to Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003. It used the Office Resource Kit and other software tools to aid in deployment, planning, and installation. Before project completion, the company saw a reduction in help desk calls, its highest system stability, and increased user productivity. Now that company employees use the same desktop software, IT spends less time monitoring and maintaining infrastructure and can put more time into creating solutions to drive the business forward.
Situation
United Stationers Inc. is one of the largest wholesale distributors of business products in the world with an inventory of more than 40,000 items from more than 450 manufacturers, available to approximately 15,000 resellers worldwide. To manage both the high volume of product lines and the demand for a quick delivery cycle, United Stationers operates an extensive distribution network that includes over 70 distribution centers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Over the years, United Stationers has been growing its network of affiliates by acquiring a number of businesses to meet market demand. As a result, the company operates on a loosely bound network, in which some of its affiliates are aligned with the Information Technology (IT) department and others operate more independently. This, in addition to United Stationers’ heavy reliance on leased hardware, made managing its IT infrastructure a challenge, especially when planning system-wide deployments.
At the same time, the company was finding that its current desktop configuration, running Microsoft® Office 2000 on either the Microsoft Windows NT® operating system version 4.0 or the Microsoft Windows® 2000 operating system, failed to meet the needs of its employees, who often suffered from outdated security, a lack of support, and insufficient remote access capabilities. As a result, the productivity of the company’s remote workforce, which includes 250 sales team members who are frequently on the road meeting with customers, was greatly limited.
By upgrading the company’s technology infrastructure, United Stationers realized that the company could provide employees with better mobile capabilities and offer top-notch performance by allowing end users to access and utilize critical business information.
“There’s a real advantage to United Stationers using the latest and greatest software. We have the technical opportunity to drive business and productivity solutions that can really make a difference to the business,” said Frank Arvidson, Manager of Office and Mobile Computing, United Stationers Inc.
Solution
Taking advantage of the upcoming hardware refresh cycle scheduled in late fall 2003, United Stationers approached its business leaders to approve a system-wide upgrade to a configuration running Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.
“Through different presentations on Office 2003 I had seen prior to the product launch, I was already impressed with the offerings and thought we had an opportunity to take advantage of new features and technologies such as the e-mail desktop alerts, increased security in Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, and the ability to restrict editing and formatting in Microsoft Office Word 2003 through information rights management technologies,” said Arvidson. “So, I talked to our management team and convinced them that it would be well worth the upgrade. They looked at the offerings of Office 2003 and agreed.”
After the decision was made to prepare for a system-wide upgrade, it was a matter of setting a timeline and project plan for how the rollout would be implemented.
Planning the Deployment
The IT department at United Stationers is divided into two groups: application development and operations/infrastructure. The former is responsible for managing United Stationers’ distribution-based systems and developing the company’s core custom applications. The operations/infrastructure team handles deployment and support for existing equipment, monitors user PCs for compliance, and helps drive user productivity through technology investments.
As the deployment team geared up for an upgrade to Office Professional Edition 2003 with Windows XP, they chose to align the software roll out with a series of hardware refresh contracts to maximize resources. “In Fall 2003 we had all of our laptops coming off lease, and we targeted those systems for the initial update,” said Tom Kentish, Senior Desktop Computing Analyst at United Stationers Inc.
Within the community of users that would be refreshing laptops, United Stationers planned to focus on getting the company’s sales team outfitted first, as these employees spent a majority of the time in public and generating revenue for the company. The deployment team then scheduled sets of new system rollouts based on when the leased contracts expired.
“Our sales and support ambassadors have large exposure to customers in the outside world. It’s important that we equip them with tools that show our customers that United Stationers is an innovative, technologically adept company,” noted Kentish.
Although lease contracts will continue to expire quarterly until 2007, the company managed to upgrade most PCs through the lease swaps and completed the rest during the desktop deployment project. Altogether, the company-wide deployment took approximately 12 months to complete.
Building and Testing the Update
To build the test image, United Stationers used Symantec Ghost and Wise Studio 3 Basic from Wise Solutions, wholly acquired by Altiris, Inc., to script aspects of installation that required personalization. Initial tests were performed and focused on Office 2003 with Windows XP compatibility with the company’s existing applications operating on the network. Encountering no significant issues, the team engaged a broader community of beta testers across United Stationers.
“It was important to enroll a group reliant on different role-specific and group-specific applications and ensure the new image was interacting well with the other software without disrupting user productivity,” said Jose Padilla, Senior Desktop Specialist at United Stationers who led development of the Office 2003 image for the desktop deployment. “So we made sure to have a mix of power users and non-power users testing the software.” As glitches arose, the deployment team would address them and make adjustments to the desktop image.
According to Padilla, some of the issues were not with the features or technology of the software upgrade, but with the new terminology used in the updated version. For example, users learned that what was called “synchronize” in Outlook 2000 is called “send and receive” in the Outlook 2003 messaging and collaboration client.
During the testing phase, United Stationers also discovered that there were several Microsoft Access databases in use. To address this issue, the deployment team decided it would leave these databases intact in their original file format and allow Outlook 2003 to perform an automatic conversion when users opened those databases for the first time using Microsoft Office Access 2003.
In all, the testing phases called for only three iterations of the desktop image before the IT group felt it had a solid build in place for broad distribution. This portion of the deployment planning was completed within the 90-day period the deployment team had allotted.
Performing the Deployment
The company-wide installation of the new desktop image started first with the 250 members of its sales force. Because all the members of this group would be receiving new laptops as part of implementation, after the hardware became available, the deployment team would start first with transferring personalization settings and files stored on the users’ current laptops to a file share on the company’s network.
The team then used the Microsoft Office Resource Kit to help with setting up the new laptops. Copying the required installation files to a hidden folder on the local computer, they then used the Custom Installation Wizard to install Office 2003 and create personalization settings associated with the specific user, such as their user profile and account information for Outlook 2003. After the installation was complete, the local source could remain available to the IT admin for repairing, reinstalling, or updating Office later on.
To help get its sales force up and running on the Office software, United Stationers compiled a comprehensive user manual that would accompany the new hardware upon delivery. Material used in the manual was pulled from a number of resources, including the Office 2003 Resource Guide and resources provided on Microsoft Office Online (www.microsoft.com/office). The majority of the focus was around common user interface issues such as updated verbiage on the menu and pointers for where to find certain features on the toolbars. The manual also included information particularly useful to the sales force such as how to set up Outlook in Cached Mode and other features relevant to remote users.
When the rollout to the sales force was complete, deployment across the rest of the company was handled in phases based on when the next batch of leased hardware would be renewed. And as the help desk worked with employees to troubleshoot technology issues they encountered on older systems, the technical staff installed the new Office 2003 image.
To provide an extra layer of security, the deployment team also stored all end-user data on the network file share for 90 days. This extra step ensured critical information could be easily retrieved from the network in the event the user ran into any incompatibility issues.
Benefits
For United Stationers, the system-wide rollout of a new standardized desktop based on Office 2003 and Windows XP has already delivered substantial benefits for the company. The company has used IT resources more efficiently; increased user training, which can yield an even higher return on investment; improved operational management and efficiency; and used the Microsoft Office System to drive innovation.
Maximizing IT Resources by Reducing Demand on Technical Support
From a support perspective, the IT department has found Office 2003 to be very stable and require less time from the help desk to reconfigure or tend to performance issues related to the software. The company has also seen a reduction in calls to the help desk related to ‘how-tos’ and other functionality questions. Instead, employees are often found helping each other use the technology and becoming more familiar with new functionality.
“The fact that everyone is on the same platform, and that the platform has shown itself to be reliable, has been a real benefit to the IT team,” added Arvidson. “Not only can we concentrate on supporting and training users on a standard set of technologies, but we can focus our patch and upgrade testing and deployments on those technologies. This is quite a savings of technician time and better serves the end user.”
United Stationers’ help desk and support staff also like the ability to have local installation files saved on local disks—an option new to Office 2003. With it, the technical services can perform maintenance tasks, such as install on demand or detect and repair without being prompted for a network source. It also allows them to apply binary (client) updates without being prompted for another source—the source is already available locally.
“Most of our people are outside of our main three-building campus, and that makes it harder to fix problems,” explained Padilla. “Under the Office 2000 installation, we often had to perform these tasks over a 56 kilobit line, and that was difficult. Now with everything needed right there on the user’s system, that’s no longer a problem.”
Increasing User Training Can Yield Even Higher Return on Investment
Another key takeaway for Arvidson and his team has been the opportunity to gain even greater productivity through end-user education. “We discovered that our users were not really taking advantage of all the features and functionality in Office 2003,” explained Arvidson. For example, although the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 information-gathering program was installed with the Office 2003 build, he found that very few users understood how they could use InfoPath to perform certain process-driven tasks. “We’re working on a number of new opportunities within the company right now where we can better leverage our investments and one of our goals is to get more use out of XML technology through InfoPath forms. For example, we plan on moving from paper-based to electronic forms; we also do quite a bit of surveying. Since InfoPath comes with Office 2003, we now have technology at our disposal that can be part of these efforts.”
One area in which the IT group is hoping to increase awareness about new functionality in Office is through the United Stationers intranet system. By combining tech support sites onto this central resource, users across offices and subsidiaries have easy access to helpful resources including a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page focused on Microsoft Office System applications, servers, and services. To help manage this resource, the team appointed a go-to person within the IT department to own content updates and serve as the resident expert on Microsoft Office for employees of United Stationers.