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Microsoft .NET Customer Solution Case Study Consulting Firm Set to Streamline Project Management, Maximize Resources, Drive Profits Overview Country or Region: Australia Industry: Engineering Customer Profile SMEC is an engineering firm that supplies services around the world to government, international agencies, and the private sector in physical and social infrastructure, urban planning, and environmental analysis. It has 1,500 staff and an annual turnover of more than A$100 million. Business Situation SMEC wanted an integrated enterprise system that would manage and streamline its business processes to help the company win business and staff projects, manage engagements, and streamline financial operations. Solution SMEC implemented an integrated business and project management system based on Microsoft® .NET technologies along with Active Directory®, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Benefits More effective data management Improved contract win rates Streamlined project administration Ability to scale to meet future needs “We’ll save time and money and win more business. That’s a natural progression of having better information systems.” Dennis Harris, General Manager ITC, SMEC When your business spans the globe and involves the project management of physical and social infrastructure that literally changes the course of rivers and lives, you can leave nothing to chance. Operating on such a profound scale means Australia-based consulting firm SMEC needs efficient, reliable, and secure tools to manage its diverse projects and manage the flow of information across the firm. By leveraging Web services and Microsoft .NET technologies, SMEC has integrated its information systems to improve effectiveness across the spectrum of its activities. The firm will have a single source of intelligence for automating and managing every aspect of its project-focused business, including bid management, engagement delivery, customer information, resource management, and project accounting. SMEC expects that productivity gains and increased revenue will soon follow. “The system will give our staff the tools they need to manage an increasingly complex business and contribute to SMEC’s competitive advantage.” Situation Alastair McKendrick, Chief Financial Officer, SMEC Privatized in 1993, SMEC is now a multidisciplinary consulting firm. Its services include investigation and analysis, project design, project management, construction supervision, program design, capacity building, and training. At any one time, its consultants are involved in a variety of projects—anything from a suburban freeway in Australia or electricity supply in Iraq to a coal mine in Bangladesh or clean drinking water in Mozambique. SMEC was established by the Australian government in 1970 to retain and apply the people and experience of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme to various aid projects around the world. The hydro scheme—which ran from 1949 to 1974— remains the biggest engineering project ever undertaken in Australia and one of the world’s great engineering achievements. SMEC is regularly listed among the most successful Australian suppliers of services to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. It has offices in most Australian capital cities and in its major markets in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, and throughout Asia. Since its sale to staff ten years ago, SMEC’s fee revenue and staff numbers have tripled. SMEC has also expanded its presence in Australia and overseas, developing a network of offices and subsidiaries. However, General Manager ITC, Dennis Harris, says this growth and structural change placed considerable strain on the company’s processes, leading to the decision to introduce a totally new integrated business and project management system. “The main catalyst for the upgrade was that we have 1,500 people in 40 countries, and 70 percent of our revenue comes from overseas, but we had no viable IT infrastructure other than an old UNIX accounting system that had passed its use-by date in the mid-90s,” Harris says. He continues: “We had inadequate email and local area networks that in many cases had grown from project sites and developed into regional offices. They were managed locally, so they got little attention, and the whole thing became a risk to the company. There was no overall management of information and no central place where you could go to find marketing material, historical material, or information about the company.” “That became a business issue because the company had grown rapidly, and we had plans to grow further, especially in our international business. But we didn’t have the system to achieve that. After a couple of false starts, we decided to implement a corporate information system based on project management. After all, project management is what this company does,” he adds. Solution SMEC invested in a system the company has dubbed SMECNet, developed in partnership with Epicor Software and Professional Advantage. Well aware of the risks inherent in the introduction of a comprehensive business management system and the need for planning and preparation, SMEC’s Chief Financial Officer, Alastair McKendrick, says the new system is designed with SMEC’s specific business needs in mind. “The system will be introduced in stages through the network of business units and legal entities,” says McKendrick. SMECNet has been designed not only to accommodate SMEC’s current needs, but also to anticipate the firm’s documentation, communication, and information needs for many years to come. It will become the operational foundation of SMEC’s business and ensure efficiency and security as the firm continues to grow. Professional Advantage won Platform Solution of the Year at the Microsoft® Partner Program Awards for its work with SMECNet. It provided the technology infrastructure for SMECNet, which is a Microsoft .NET connection software application. Jonathan Klug, Director, Professional Advantage, says: “Having a customer with such a professional approach to a project helped us to ensure it was a success.” SMECNet currently has more than 1,000 users, with about 500 of them outside Australia. One of the major requirements of the project was to provide various methods of connectivity. Depending on the bandwidth available, many SMECNet users have to log on from remote areas and may only have dialup connections. The project uses multiple Microsoft technologies: the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Standard and Advanced Editions operating systems (part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software), SQL Server™ 2000 Standard and Advanced Editions, the Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition communication and collaboration server, Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000, Office Project Server 2003, Active Directory® directory service, Operations Manager 2000, and Window® SharePoint® Services. “The project went to tender, and we investigated the market,” says Harris. “We got seven realistic responses, and every one of them advocated Microsoft .NET. They offered no alternative. It was Microsoft .NET, Web services, the Internet, SQL Server [2000]—a pure Microsoft solution.” He continues: “Epicor was one of two companies at the time that had redeveloped their products to a .NET architecture, and they were in front by some way. They came in with Professional Advantage, who designed and delivered an infrastructure based on a Microsoft platform.” “It was a complete change in the culture of this business. We have people who would rather be in boots and padded jackets moving the Khyber Pass six meters south than do anything else. The previous system was essentially paper-based, but now we want these people to use a laptop to record their time and plan their projects. It’s a challenge,” he adds. The nature of SMEC’s work means some of its offices—such as those in Tanzania and Papua New Guinea—are located where local telecommunications prevent useful access to the Internet. This is a situation over which SMEC has no control. Harris says SMEC knew there would be parts of the world where its new system would not work, but as telecommunications infrastructure in these countries improves, so too will the effectiveness of its new system. Benefits McKendrick says: “This will be a significant change in the way the company conducts its business. However, with the introduction of SMECNet, we expect to have more flexibility and better organizational responsiveness to meet the future challenges of global growth and increasing competition.” “The system will give our staff the tools they need to manage an increasingly complex business and contribute to SMEC’s ongoing competitive advantage,” he adds. More Effective Data Management Not only will SMECNet replace SMEC’s current financial management system, it will also provide the company with more effective data management and analysis and allow it to retire a number of offline project management and reporting systems. These legacy systems required users to update information and manipulate data manually, which was time-consuming and prone to costly human error. “We see that the investment will pay for itself simply through access to general knowledge about the company and how [technically] projects have been done in the past,” says Harris. He continues: “For example, if we’re building a dam in Africa, and we had completed one before in Cambodia, we can now get that information to the right people at the right time. This will help us grow the business.” While much of SMEC’s work is with the development community and aid agencies, more and more of its business is with private companies that expect streamlined performance from contractors. Harris says electronic project management, having information online, and being able to access and create data in real time will allow SMEC to manage its data more effectively and meet client expectations. “We’ll save time and money and win more business,” says Harris. “That’s a natural progression of having better information systems. For example, Windows SharePoint Services is the world’s best-kept secret. It’s a terrific service, and we’re getting a lot out of it.” Improved Contract Win Rates Harris says: “The expected benefits are largely to do with marketing. We are a diverse company running many offices in the developing world, and we are growing rapidly. The greatest burden on our people overseas is keeping up with our marketing and putting together proposals. That process involves finding out what has been done before. We had no efficient way of doing that. There would be pieces of paper spread all over the world and no easy way of knowing what was available or what we had done.” He continues: “You would have to find the right people, ring them, hope they were available, and find out what they had done. The greatest benefit with this new system will come from the availability of that information online. It will be organized and easy to find, and we will have the ability to present it in a corporate format.” Streamlined Project Administration Changes within SMEC have made project planning and management a critical business issue for the firm, which at any one time can be working on up to 500 projects across many countries. The new business and project management system will allow SMEC to become a realtime, Web-enabled organization across all business functions, including business development, project planning, job management, billing, and finance. SMEC will have better insight into how it is performing, from client acquisition and project planning to delivery and accounting. The solution will enable SMEC’s project management staff, no matter where they are located, to simultaneously review the latest information relating to the company’s projects, communicate in real time, and improve review and response times. The result will be reduced duplication, better consistency, and streamlined project administration. Ability to Scale to Meet Future Needs Harris is confident the new system will scale to meet the firm’s strategic vision of For More Information For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com For more information about Professional Advantage products and services, call +61 (02) 9919 8900 or visit the Web site at: www.pa.com.au For more information about SMEC products and services, call +61 (02) 6452 0222 or visit the Web site at: www.smec.com.au Document published December 2005 Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages. “Everyone here knows what our issues are as a business, and we can all see the end game,” he says. “We work in an industry where it is important to find any competitive advantage and where managing growth is vital. So, in implementing a system such as this, the entire thinking of the company has changed. Having said that, we’re all pretty excited about where we are headed. .NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device. “We thought that someone else would have done this before and knew what it was about, but we discovered that our issues are unique and that we are at the forefront of such an application in our marketplace anywhere in the world. We did not necessarily want to be on the cutting edge, but this was the only option we had to achieve what we wanted to achieve, without substantially greater investment.” For more information about Microsoft .NET and Web services, please visit these Web sites: www.microsoft.com/net msdn.microsoft.com/webservices Software and Services Hardware Products − Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition − Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 − Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 − Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 − Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Standard and Advanced Editions − Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard and Advanced Editions Technologies − Active Directory − Microsoft .NET − Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services − Web Services © 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, SharePoint, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Microsoft .NET supporting international growth over the coming years. Cisco Pix 515 Firewalls Cisco 2611 Routers Cisco 3700 Series Switches Hitachi Data Systems Storage Area Network Partners Professional Advantage