Case Study (PDF) - Avanade

Microsoft Office System
Customer Solution Case Study
Retail Business Teams Collaborate More
Effectively with Centralised Portal
Overview
Country or Region: Switzerland
Industry: Retail and Hospitality
Customer Profile
Coop is a retail company based in
Switzerland. The company has nine different
operations and employs more than 45,000
people throughout five sales regions.
Business Situation
Coop had a decentralised file sharing
system, and employees in each of the
company’s business support teams could not
access information created in different
business units.
Solution
The company deployed a centralised
document management system based on
Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server
2003. The solution helps employees find
information created by different teams.
Benefits
• Employees easily create team sites.
• Partners access information.
• Internal resources easier to use.
• Colleagues collaborate seamlessly.
• IT overheads reduced by 50 per cent.
“Easy-to-use tools in Windows SharePoint Services
mean that managers don’t have to rely on IT support
to amend and update content on a regular basis.”
Kurt Uhlmann, Chief Technical Officer, Coop
Switzerland-based retailer Coop employs 45,000 people in five
sales regions. Its employees work in close partnership with
suppliers and customers, developing new product lines for nine
separate business operations. But until 2006, teams could not
view information created in different business units, so they were
unable to use the company’s market research, reports, and
documentation. Coop worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner
Avanade and Microsoft Services to implement a centralised
document management system based on Microsoft Office
SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. Employees can now access
documents from other business units and re-use content more
efficiently.

“Our employees work on
many different projects
at any one time and yet
they couldn’t access
documentation on
project proposals,
protocols, and
presentations when they
were working away from
the office.”
Kurt Uhlmann, Chief Technical Officer, Coop
Situation
Much of today’s business research and
analysis is held within small project groups. It
is important that large, geographically
dispersed organisations find a way to ensure
that employees can access this information
and insight generated by colleagues within
their project teams. In this way, employees
can make better use of existing resources by
building on each other’s work and contacting
in-house experts.
The Swiss Retail company Coop recognises
the importance of knowledge sharing to its
business. It employs more than 45,000
people across its five sales areas and is one
of the country’s largest retailers. Dozens of
regional project teams work together
developing new product lines for Coop retail
outlets, which respond to current customer
needs. Its current business operations span
nine different divisions, including
supermarket megastores, building supply
outlets, petrol stations, restaurants, and
clothing, furniture, and lighting stores.
But prior to 2006, it was difficult for
employees in each support team to access
and share information held in different
business units. Coop had a decentralised file
sharing system, and each region and retail
operation used its own document
management method. These systems were
not integrated and employees could not
share information—such as Microsoft Office
PowerPoint® presentations, Microsoft Office
Excel® worksheets, and PDF files—with
project teams at other sites.
Kurt Uhlmann, Enterprise Architect, Coop,
says: “Our employees work on many different
projects at any one time and yet they couldn’t
access documentation on project proposals,
protocols, and presentations when they were
working away from the office.” Employees
were also unable to draw on the research and
experience of teams in other divisions that
could help them with their projects. Uhlmann
says: “We needed to make it possible for
them to access and find relevant
documentation from within the company.”
Colleagues often helped each other by
sending information as e-mail message
attachments. But this became increasingly
inconvenient and time-consuming for IT
employees, who found a lot of their time went
on managing the strain on the company’s 80
geographically dispersed servers.
Coop wanted to find a replacement for its filesharing
and document management system.
In 2004, the retailer approached Microsoft, to
help it find a more streamlined, accessible,
and efficient document management system.
Solution
In April 2005, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner
Avanade and Microsoft Services began
working with Coop to develop a proof of
concept for a secure, centralised document
management system. The solution, a
company intranet based on Microsoft Office
SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and
Windows® SharePoint Services, went live to
7,000 employees in February 2006.
The solution has integrated all of the
company’s business information into a
secure, central repository from which
employees can view the product and service
documentation created by their own teams.
Using a single logon, colleagues across all
sales divisions can access documents that
are publicly available on team sites and from
within the company’s document library.
Coop employees can easily create portal
pages that contain useful content for their
partners, people within their team, and
across the organisation. They also set limits
on user access to information contained on
their portal pages, which helps to ensure the
confidentiality of sensitive material.

“SharePoint Portal
Server 2003 will help us
to work more effectively.
For example, a project
manager can open a
new project site and
make the relevant
information immediately
available to their project
team.”
Kurt Uhlmann, Chief Technical Officer, Coop
When employees in other departments
search for information, only publicly available
data is picked up and added to the search
results. Uhlmann says: “SharePoint Portal
Server 2003 will help us to work more
effectively. For example, a project manager
can open a new project site and make the
relevant information immediately available to
their project team.”
Employees can also work from documents
stored in their team portal or “My
Documents” folder, and changes or
amendments are immediately synchronised
with the files and folders stored in the portal.
Benefits
Since the IT team introduced the centralised
document management system, employees
can find and access useful business
documents located across the company.
Colleagues can work on the same documents
and share project information easily, leaving
more time to focus on generating new
products and services for customers. The IT
team finds the new system easier to
administer, reducing its workload by 50 per
cent.
Project Leaders Create Personalised
Sites Easily
Coop project team leaders can now easily
create personalised team sites that help
employees within their team to quickly view
project information when they need to.
Uhlmann says: “Easy-to-use tools in Windows
SharePoint Services mean that managers
don’t have to rely on the IT team to amend
and update content on a regular basis.”
Portal pages are always up to date and reflect
the content most relevant and useful for the
people in their team.
Managers Foster Collaborative Working
Environments with Partners
Managers can create sites for Coop business
partners as needed. This helps employees in
partner organisations connect with project
teams within Coop and fosters a more
productive working relationship. “We can link
our suppliers to project documents and to
people’s personal sites, which makes it
easier for them to access documents they
need.” says Uhlmann.
Employees Find and Re-Use Valuable
Content
Using the search functions in SharePoint
Portal Server 2003, employees can now
quickly find documents held in the document
library or in team sites—such as sales reports
and advertising material—created by other
project teams within the company. “People
can re-use the content to work towards
valuable new products and services, instead
of wasting time creating new reports and
communications from scratch,” says
Uhlmann.
Teams Work Together Seamlessly
Managers and employees can see project
timelines and the progress of their team
along with the most recent versions of
documents created by team members.
Previously, users struggled to work together
efficiently. For example, employees visiting
other business divisions would have to return
to their own office to update their documents
or rely on colleagues to send the right
attachments by e-mail. Now, users can
access their up-to-date documents from any
branch of the organisation.
IT Support Can Reduce Running Costs
With employees able to view important
information on the intranet, fewer documents
are sent as large e-mail message
attachments. “Since installing the solution,
our IT support team has reduced the server
storage capacity by 50 per cent through
consolidation of decentralised file sharing
systems,” says Uhlmann. In addition, servers
are now located on one site, which the IT
team finds easier to manage. Previously,

For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 426-
9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-
2495. 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
three people maintained 80 servers, and now
the department deploys one person to
manage 16 servers. Support employees are
free to focus on adding value in other areas,
instead of constantly responding to problems.
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:
www.microsoft.com/office
For more information about Avanade
products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.Avanade.com
For more information about Coop products
and services, visit the Web site at:
www.coop.ch
Software and Services
• Microsoft Office
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server 2003
• Technologies
–Windows SharePoint Services
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published November 2007