Customer Solution Case Study
/ Nonprofit Cuts Customer Response Times by 25 Percent with Advanced Query System
Overview
Country or Region:Ireland
Industry:Nonprofit
Customer Profile
Based in Dublin, Ireland, Pobal is a nonprofit organization of 190 employees that manages community-based programs on behalf of the Irish government and the European Union.
Business Situation
Pobal employees needed an easier and faster way to access critical information about its beneficiaries that was stored in multiple line-of-business systems.
Solution
Using LookupPoint, a solution that runs on top of Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Pobal employees can instantly view data stored within multiple data sources.
Benefits
- Higher productivity
- Improved customer service
- Reduced costs
- Faster implementation
Liam Butler, Information Manager, Pobal
How fast an organization can access critical business information makes the difference between one that’s responsive and one that’s inefficient. Yet when important information is stored in disparate databases, aggregating this data can be both time-consuming and expensive. Pobal, a nonprofit company based in Ireland, found a way to quickly give employees the information they need, increasing the organization’s productivity and responsiveness to customers. By using LookupPoint, a solution from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Spanish Point Technologies that is based on the integration of Microsoft Office 2010 with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Pobal employees now can pull information housed in multiple data sources into a single view within the Office programs that they already use. With this solution, Pobal has cut one quarter off the time it takes to respond to requests for information.
Situation
With approximately 190 employees, Pobal is nonprofit company with charitable status that manages social programs on behalf of the Irish government and the European Union. The Dublin-based organization, which was established in 1992, supports communities and local agencies that promote social inclusion, reconciliation, and equality.
Pobal currently manages 17 different programs and allocates approximately €330 million (approximately U.S.$455 million) to more than 4,000 groups each year. The company makes funding recommendations, works with nongovernmental organizations to develop contracts, and conducts audits to ensure that beneficiaries comply with government requirements.
As part of itsbusiness process review, Pobal began to examine ways it could streamline operations across the organization. As the company searched for ways to become more efficient, one obstacle was the difficulty of retrieving critical business information needed to make effective decisions.
The problem was that different pieces of information about the beneficiaries with whom Pobal works were stored in separate line-of-business systems inside the company and on external government websites. For example, Pobal uses multiple databases to store much of its core information about beneficiaries, including their contact information, funding levels, and the specific programs in which they’re enrolled. It uses a financial system to house accounting information such as past payments made to each beneficiary, and payments due for the next period. And it uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to store correspondence, inspection reports, and other vital documents about each beneficiary. In addition to these internal systems, Pobal employees often rely upon a subscription-based government website that contains detailed compliance information about Ireland’s nonprofits.
Compiling information from these disparate data sources was proving cumbersome. For example, Pobal often receives questions from Members of Parliament about specific aspects of its work. A simple question about the funding Pobal provides to a specific region of the country could require multiple employees to carry out numerous database queries. Executives may have needed to contact multiple staff members to find beneficiary information and ask a financial manager to determine the most recent payments made to all of these beneficiaries. “It was very much a manual process and prone to error,” says Liam Butler, Information Manager for Pobal.
“We lacked a way to unify our thinking and to unify our systems,” says Butler. “What we needed was a way for employees to access information about beneficiaries, contracts, payments, and audits all in one place.”
In addition to integrating its data, Pobal wanted to improve the efficiency of its inspection processes so it could take on more work. In December 2009, the company was given an opportunity to inspect 4,000 childcare centers throughout Ireland to ensure that the facilities were complying with government requirements; without a quick way to enter information from inspection reports into its systems, however, the job would be too time-consuming to take on.
“We simply didn’t have the staffing resources to do it,” Butler says. “When we saw this piece of work, we knew the only way we could make it happen would be to go to market and get an information system that worked.”
Solution
To address these challenges, Pobal enlisted Spanish Point Technologies, an award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that builds innovative solutions for customers in the public and financial sectors. Spanish Point helped Pobal integrate its data using LookupPoint, a product developed by Spanish Point that runs on top of Microsoft Office 2010 and is integrated with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. With LookupPoint, Pobal employees can pull data from different sources and view it in one screen from within any of the Office 2010 programs. In addition, using SharePoint Server 2010authentication capabilities within the LookupPoint pane, employees can access the exact page they are looking for in the relevant application to update information without cumbersome additional sign-in requirements.
“Thanks toOffice 2010 and its integration with SharePoint 2010, our employees can now get the business information they need without having to waste time searching through multiple data sources,” Butler says.
Integrating Data Access
To develop LookupPoint, Spanish Point used the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 professional development system, which includes a toolset for creating rich applications that are integrated with SharePoint Server 2010 and the web. According to John Corley, Chief Technology Officer at Spanish Point Technologies, the powerful editing and design features of Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint Server 2010 made it easy to develop LookupPoint, and to continually update and improve it.
For example, Spanish Point used new Visual Studio 2010 templates that are integrated with SharePoint Server 2010 as well as the Client Object Model, a new programming interface for SharePoint 2010 that facilitates information integration into client applications to speed up development. "These have greatly facilitated automation of development in contrast with the previous version, when the development process was very reliant on time-consuming and error prone editing of complex XML files,” says Corley.
By taking advantage of Business Connectivity Services, a new feature in SharePoint Server 2010, Spanish Point configured LookupPoint to pull data from Pobal internal line-of-business systems. It is also working to develop links to government websites. LookupPoint brings data into Word, Excel, and InfoPath using the SharePoint Server 2010 Client Object Model to access related documents and lists stored within SharePoint Server, simplifying Pobal processes and workflow. “We just wouldn’t be able to do this without SharePoint Server 2010,” says Corley. “It would require a large amount of custom code, rather than being something we can do directly with software out of the box.”
Spanish Point used the new research pane functionality in Microsoft Office 2010 to create a LookupPoint feature it calls “SmartPreview.” SmartPreview enables users to call up a preview of business information associated with a particular item by moving the mouse over that item before clicking it for further detail. “Because of the new research pane in Office 2010 and the ability to connect to data services, we’ve been able to deliver preview information without having to install software on any client computer,” says Corley.
Integrating Inspection Reports
In addition to deploying LookupPoint, Spanish Point Technologies helped Pobal to automatically integrate its childcare inspection reports with other information stored on SharePoint Server. Spanish Point used Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, an electronic forms creation and gathering tool, to design a digital form that inspectors fill out on Tablet PCs as they travel between childcare centers. All of the data entered into the InfoPath forms is sent to a central SharePoint site, which aggregates the data and makes it accessible to employees via LookupPoint.
“Without this technology, an administrator would have had to manually key in all of the data from the inspection forms into our system, which would have been a full-time job,” says Butler. “It just wouldn’t have been a viable project for us to take on.”
With the inspection reports automatically integrated into SharePoint Server 2010 and available through LookupPoint, employees can now instantly view information about past inspections and respond more quickly to information requests. “The information just pops up in front of me,” says Butler. “This is a huge step forward in retrieving information.”
Pobal began testing LookupPoint in conjunction with Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 in April 2010, and rolled the solution out to employees three weeks later. The company plans to continually update LookupPoint as new information needs arise.
Benefits
The ability to quickly retrieve critical business information is helping Pobal to advance its business and respond more effectively to the needs of its constituents. Among the benefits are faster information retrieval, higher employee productivity, improved customer service, reduced costs, and faster implementation.
Higher Productivity
Before, employees had to query multiple sources to obtain critical business information, often relying on other people to get it for them; now, with LookupPoint, they can view information immediately, from a single screen within their Microsoft Outlook, Word, or Excel programs. This convenience has dramatically improved worker productivity, freeing up employees to spend less time searching for information and more time working on strategic projects.
“This has been invaluable,” says Butler. “It is making a big difference, especially to senior managers who are infrequent users of the different line-of-business applications.Because they use these systems infrequently, they often waste time establishing system locations and log-in credentials.”
Whereas previously, employees had to contact a financial manager to see whether a purchase order had been approved and the service delivered, by using LookupPoint, employees can now call up this information themselves. They can also process applications filed by nonprofits more quickly by viewing information about each application right from within an Excel worksheet; rather than manually looking up the status of each applicant, they can simply click the applicant’s name from within the worksheet to see when the application was received and if someone has responded to it.
“Like many organizations, we’re facing a situation in which the demand for our services has increased at the same time that the number of staff we have to fulfill those services has decreased,” says Butler. “LookupPoint is helping us to fill the gap.”
Improved Customer Service
In addition to being more productive, employees are now able to more easily monitor the beneficiaries of their programs and make more informed decisions, faster, improving the level of service Pobal offers its customers. Likewise, the ability to quickly access vital information has made Pobal more agile and responsive. For example, the turnaround time for many requests for information has been reduced by at least 25 percent.
“Using Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 together as our business productivity platform is helping us to do our job really well,” says Butler. “We see this as a key differentiator well into the future.”
Reduced Costs
The ability to quickly retrieve information has also helped Pobal to save money. Employees who once spent time searching for data have been freed up to work on other projects, Moreover, because LookupPoint was built on the familiar Office 2010 integrated with SharePoint Server 2010, employees have been able to use the product right from the start, without training.
“The whole thrust of LookupPoint is that it makes information available to people through the tools they already use and spend most of their time with, which is Microsoft Office,” says Butler.
Faster Implementation
Basing LookupPoint on SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 also saved on deployment time. Because SharePoint Server 2010 provides data integration capabilities out of the box with Business Connectivity Services, Spanish Point was able to integrate LookupPoint with multiple line-of-business systems and web-based services without having to write custom code. In addition, Pobal executives with no software development experience could configure LookupPoint to display the specific information they needed from an easy-to-use administration console.
“There’s little customer development involved,” says Corley. “Users can literally select the pieces of information they want to expose and then configure how they want that information displayed and linked to other data.”
By using Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 as its business productivity platform, Pobal significantly improved its business operations in a short amount of time. “Literally, Pobal went from planning the project to implementing it within three weeks,” says Corley. “That kind of speed is only possible if you build on a platform that people already know how to use.”
Microsoft Office 2010
Microsoft Office 2010 gives your people powerful, timesaving tools to do their best work from more places. With new capabilities and insightful updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, Office 2010 offers the complete package—with familiar, intuitive tools. Now you can express ideas, solve problems, connect with people, and create amazing results—in the office, at home, or on the go.
For more information about Microsoft Office, go to: