Jeanne Spear, IT Operations Analyst, Liberty Mutual

“Simply put, because I can do more of my analysis and presentation work directly in Excel 2010, I can save time and I’m ultimately more effective at my job.”

Jeanne Spear, IT Operations Analyst, Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual wanted to boost employee productivity and support efficient collaboration, while improving process control. It decided to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010, initiating pilot deployments within several teams in its IT Group. These teams are now using capabilities in a number of Office 2010 programs to better manage and present complex information while optimizing process flows to save time.

Business Needs

Liberty Mutual Group provides insurance products for consumers and businesses worldwide. To maintain its edge in a competitive market, the company continuously searches for ways to support employee productivity.

A majority of the company’s 45,000 employees have relied on applications in the 2003 Microsoft Office system. In 2009, executives looked at upgrading this software to offer employees a new set of tools for managing large volumes of information with greater ease and completing daily tasks more quickly.

Employees in the company’s IT Strategy and Planning and other IT groups identified areas where they could gain efficiency with access to improved data management tools. In one instance, members of the IT Strategy and Planning Group needed to perform an analysis of companywide server utilization data. Because Office Excel 2003 spreadsheet software accommo-dates a maximum of 64,000 rows, staff first needed to export the statistical information to Microsoft Office Access 2003 database software. “Because of the row limitation in Office Excel 2003, we had to add a step to our process,” says Jeanne Spear, a business analyst in the IT Strategy and Planning Group at Liberty Mutual.

Other staff members also saw an opportunity for greater process efficiency by using a single application to organize and present information. The group’s User Support team, which is responsible for creating knowledge articles to guide the internal release of business applications, relied heavily on email to share meeting notes, document drafts, and status reports. “We needed a better way to track the flow of information from start to finish for each project,” says Michael Stanton, Senior Business Analyst with the User Support team at Liberty Mutual.

Furthermore, the group’s IT Training and Communications team looked for a way to create more compelling employee training presentations while saving time. And, the company’s IT leaders wanted to make it easier for employees to quickly archive and recover email messages. Email retention is especially important for Liberty Mutual as a large and well-known insurance company that handles customer information.

Solution

Liberty Mutual chose to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010 and initiated multiple pilot deployments beginning in February of 2010.

Spear and other IT operations analysts take advantage of new capabilities in Microsoft Excel 2010, including workbooks that can scale to more than 100 million rows, as well as improved data filtering and conditional formatting features. To efficiently process large volumes of information, Spear anticipates using such new features as Sparklines. “Sparklines are perfectly suited to showing trends over time alongside the supporting data, which is critical for my job,” Spear says.

The User Support team capitalizes on improvements to collaboration features in the Microsoft OneNote 2010 note-taking program to better control the process of creating knowledge articles. Stanton and his team are using the software as a single repository for capturing and organizing calendar and agenda items, meeting notes, and other project artifacts. Team members can now view changes to shared notebooks in near-real time and see which team member made the revisions.

The IT Training and Communications teams are using new features in the Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 presentation graphics program to accelerate creation of presentation materials. The team appreciates the new SmartArt graphics options and built-in animations, which they can use to improve the quality of presentations without increasing production time. And, this team is using OneNote 2010 to facilitate collaboration and tighten quality controlof the development of its presentations.

Moreover, IT leaders are helping employees save time in storing and recovering email messages by taking advantage of the advanced archiving functionality in the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client that works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.

Benefits

By upgrading to Microsoft Office 2010, Liberty Mutual has increased the efficiency of reporting tasks. With access to this enhanced suite of tools, employees can more effectively organize and analyze information to simplify their daily work.

Reduces Reporting Time by More Than20 Percent

With support in Excel 2010 for more than 100 million rows of data, and tools for analyzing large volumes of information, IT operations analysts can shorten reporting times by more than 20 percent. As a result of shorter reporting cycles, analysts can provide executives with access to critical business intelligence data faster. “Simply put, because I can do more of my analysis and presentation work directly in Excel 2010, I can save time and I’m ultimately more effective at my job,” says Spear.

Improves Process Control

By using OneNote 2010 to aggregate project information and deliverables, the User Support team is better able to track the development of its knowledge articles. “OneNote gives us the power to proactively manage the creation of important corporate documents so we can ensure the highest levels of accuracy,” says Stanton.

In addition, the IT Training and Communications teams are using OneNote 2010 to coordinate the development of training presentations, while using new graphics tools and templates in PowerPoint 2010 to minimize production time.

Avoids 3,000 Help-Desk Calls a Year

Through simplified email archiving and discovery tools in Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook 2010, the IT Support team at Liberty Mutual expects to see 3,000 fewer help-desk requests annually. The IT team looks forward to applying that resource time to other more customer-aligned priorities.