Customer Solution Case Study
Molecular Engineering Firm Avoids Costs and Improves Productivity with Hosted Services
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services— Engineering
Customer Profile
Zyvex Technologies is a molecular engineering company that develops advanced materials and a broad portfolio of nano-enhanced products. It is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and employs 50 people.
Business Situation
Zyvex Technologies wanted to provide more standardized desktop and communications tools to help employees in different locations work better together.
Solution
Zyvex Technologies decided to implement Microsoft Office 365, which offers cloud-based services for communication and collaboration with the Microsoft Office Professional Plus business productivity suite.
Benefits
· Control costs
· Improve productivity
· Improve communication / "By using Office 365, we have access to capabilities that would typically be reserved for very large organizations. That’s a huge advantage for us."
Lance Criscuolo, President, Zyvex Technologies
Zyvex Technologies is the leader in developing super strong lightweight products enhanced with advanced nano-materials. It was the first company to deliver nano-enhanced products, which have ranged from stronger baseball bats to the most fuel-efficient maritime vessels, such as the Piranha USV. Employees work at four locations around the United States, and the company found it challenging to provide standardized communications and productivity tools to help teams in different locations work together effectively. Zyvex Technologies decided to evaluate Microsoft Office 365, cloud-based subscription services that include the Microsoft Office Professional Plus business productivity suite. Within three weeks, Zyvex Technologies had deployed Office 365, and found it could avoid expensive upgrade costs, control IT and software costs, and improve employee productivity and communication.
Situation
Zyvex, the world’s first molecular nanotechnology company, was founded near Dallas, Texas, in 1997. Ten years later, Zyvex Technologies was spun out and relocated its headquarters to Columbus, Ohio, to focus on developing stronger and lighter next generation nano-enhanced materials technology. Zyvex Technologies has since developed a broad product portfolio of nano-enhanced products. The company employs more than 50 people and has offices in Bothell, Washington, Richardson, Texas, and Rapid City, South Dakota, in addition to its headquarters in Columbus. Among its many advanced nanotechnology projects, Zyvex Technologies developed the Piranha, an advanced maritime vessel built entirely from its nano-enhanced carbon fiber that sets new standards for fuel efficiency and range on the water.
After splitting from Zyvex in 2007, the company planned for its teams in Bothell and Columbus to focus on separate areas and operate autonomously. For messaging, each division had its own domain and engaged its own third-party IT service to help it deploy a solution to support employees. In the Bothell office, which focuses on design and manufacturing, it deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. The Columbus office, which focuses on research and development, deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, which also supported employees at its Rapid City location. Eventually, the company decided that both divisions should operate under the same domain as Zyvex Technologies.
Due to configuration and domain resolution issues, employees experienced problems exchanging messages between offices. Messages were lost in transit, and employees in Bothell had to switch between using the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client and Outlook Web App, depending on a message’s destination. Byron Nutley, Vice President of Business Operations at Zyvex Technologies, explains, “We realized we needed to re-architect our entire messaging solution to resolve this issue, which would cost us a fair bit of time and money.” In addition, the company had no communications capabilities such as instant messaging or presence in place to help employees communicate in real time. Instead, employees sent text messages to one another using their mobile phones.
Zyvex Technologies also experienced inefficiencies in business productivity and collaboration. While the majority of employees had no business productivity software, others used a mix of Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office for Mac, and Microsoft Office Visio 2003. The company wanted to deploy Microsoft Office 2010 to standardize its business productivity solution, but it was concerned about the cost of providing copies for everyone and the cost of upgrades to keep everyone on the same version going forward. For collaboration, the company used third-party products to share files across the organization. It also provided a network file share, but only a few employees used it and they frequently experienced connectivity issues when they tried to access it.
The company has very large customers that have access to all of the latest software and platforms. As a smaller business, Zyvex Technologies did not have some of the same technology capabilities, making it difficult to keep up with customers. Zyvex Technologies also wanted a way to improve its inventory management system and provide a live, intuitive visual representation of changes to its production schedule and inventory levels.
As a small company, Zyvex has only minimal IT support. Lance Criscuolo, President of Zyvex Technologies, says, “We are an advanced materials and technology company. Spending valuable resources managing an IT platform doesn't add value. We want our team to spend their time creating, designing, and building revolutionary products from our materials, not dealing with distractions from IT problems.” The company wanted a cloud-based solution for communications and collaboration, as it did not have the resources to support on-premises solutions, including the recurring upgrade cost.
Solution
To resolve its messaging issues, the company originally considered using Google Mail. “We pretty quickly ruled out Google, since employees could not work offline with their apps,” says Nutley. “We decided on cloud-based services from Microsoft, because employees can take full advantage of the Outlook client, and it offered us a robust implementation that would require minimal administration on our part.”
Zyvex Technologies joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program for Microsoft Office 365, which combines the familiar Office desktop suite with cloud-based communications and collaboration services. In a few short weeks, the company resolved two of its major challenges by using Office 365. First, it created accounts and employee mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Online, which is based on Exchange Server 2010 technology, so that employees have the latest messaging capabilities. By creating accounts online, all employees had the same domain name, which resolved its issues with dropped email due to configuration and domain issues.
Second, as part of its Office 365 subscription, Zyvex Technologies provided Microsoft Office Professional Plus to its employees, so they are now all using the same version of Office. In addition, employees will automatically receive Office upgrades as they become available, so the company does not have to worry that versions will be out of sync. By using Outlook 2010, employees can take advantage of capabilities such as Conversation View, which groups together messages from a single conversation. Employees can quickly and easily identify the most recent messages, view the chain of responses, and see a preview of each response in a conversation when they open individual messages. In addition, employees can easily work offline in Outlook 2010.
To communicate more effectively in real time, employees at Zyvex Technologies can take advantage of the presence, instant messaging, ad hoc collaboration and online meeting, and desktop sharing capabilities in Microsoft Lync Online. “The video conferencing capabilities in Lync were a major reason we wanted Office 365,” explains Nutley. “We see the potential to reduce travel and to help teams work together more effectively.” Employees can use video conferencing to share diagrams of boats and use visual aids to help make better design decisions. The company is also excited about presence and instant messaging capabilities, because employees can instantly see when colleagues are available to answer questions or help resolve issues. Employees can also view colleagues’ pictures through the Microsoft Lync 2010 client. In addition to Lync Online, Zyvex Technologies is considering replacing its private-branch exchange (PBX) telephony systems with enterprise voice through Microsoft Lync Server 2010 on-premises.
Zyvex Technologies also plans to use Microsoft SharePoint Online to boost collaboration. “With SharePoint Online, we can build project sites with common collections of documents,” says Nutley. “That way, people can go directly to the project site and get what they need.” By using SharePoint Online, the company also sees the opportunity to simplify and improve workflow processes.
Zyvex Technologies is using the advanced diagramming tools in Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 in concert with Visio Services, which is a key feature in SharePoint Online, to help monitor inventory. Nutley says, “We are using Visio 2010 to connect to SharePoint Online and get a real-time view of stock levels for materials. We use this to help with inventory management for the production schedule.” The company can easily share live visual representations of changes to production schedules and inventory levels.
The interoperability between Office 365 services such as Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Professional Plus will also help employees collaborate more effectively. People can view presence information in Lync, Outlook, Microsoft Word 2010 documents, Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheets, and all the other Office 2010 applications. Technicians and scientists who work at offices in Rapid City and Columbus frequently exchange information and ideas through Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, and now when they see that a colleague they need is available, they can send an email or start a chat session without switching to another program. They can also easily work together on documents in real time through desktop sharing in Lync 2010, and they can discuss changes through an audio or video conference while they work.
By using Office 365, Zyvex Technologies can not only ensure employees have the same version of Microsoft technologies, but it can customize its subscriptions so that employees only get the capabilities they really need to do their jobs. Nutley explains, “We have some employees in manufacturing who only need email, while many of our others need all of the services. With Office 365, we can control level of features through subscription, so we only pay for what we need.”
Benefits
By using Office 365, Zyvex Technologies resolved two of its major challenges: it resolved its email issues by standardizing on Exchange Online, and it upgraded employees to the same version of Office. It also provided the latest communications for its employees, without incurring costs for additional hardware, IT staff, or licenses. It can also ensure that employees are all using standard technologies for messaging and documents to help them work better together. “We looked at the cloud mainly to help us resolve our messaging issues and help us standardize our version of Office,” says Nutley. “With Office 365, we got a more complete solution that offers us a rich online and client experience.”
Control Costs
Because Zyvex Technologies can customize its Office 365 subscriptions to provide only the capabilities employees need to do their jobs, it can more easily control costs. “As a small company, the ability to provide only what people need through Office 365 is a huge advantage for us,” says Nutley. “As opposed to a large rollout expense for on-premises solutions, we have a more manageable, smaller monthly cost.” In addition, because Microsoft manages the infrastructure, Zyvex Technologies can reduce its costs for IT consultants.
By using Office Professional Plus, the company can also provide a standard business productivity platform for employees without additional license costs. As part of its subscription costs, employees will automatically receive upgrades to the latest version of Office Professional Plus, so the company can ensure that everyone has the most recent capabilities without paying additional licensing costs. It can also easily add subscriptions for new employees. Nutley says, “By going to a subscription model, we are always able to have the latest version of Office for everyone. Instead of a big upfront cost, we have a smaller, predictable monthly cost.”
The company also sees potential to reduce travel costs, because it can use the video conferencing capabilities in Lync Online to hold meetings. Going forward, it also sees great potential to reduce telephony costs by replacing its PBX systems with Lync enterprise voice.
Improve Productivity
Zyvex Technologies believes that the interoperability between Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online will help employees be more productive at their jobs. Scientists doing research and development in Ohio can communicate with the manufacturing team in Washington to resolve issues quickly. “With presence information visible in Outlook, Word, or the Lync client, we can see who is available at a glance and start a chat or conference immediately, which saves a lot of time,” says Nutley.
Because employees all use the same version of Office, they can more easily share Word, Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 files without the concern that they will lose content, formatting, or functionality. In addition, with SharePoint Online, they can more easily access files and work together on them without worrying about version control. “With Office 365, we can keep one document in one central location, and people can just go get it and be confident they have the latest information,” says Nutley.
By using Visio Premium 2010 and SharePoint Online to monitor inventory levels, production planners spend less time looking at raw data. More importantly, the solution will help improve the control of materials and help ensure that materials are available when needed in the production process. The company expects to be more efficient, control cost of materials, and to meet production deadlines more effectively.
The company also believes it can improve overall processes and workflows, which will also enhance productivity. Nutley explains, “Because everyone has the same tools with Office 365, we can more easily put processes in place and support workflows across the organization.”
Improve Communication
By using Exchange Online, Zyvex Technologies can resolve its current domain issues, because people will have the same domain names that resolve to the same backend infrastructure managed by Microsoft. Employees no longer need to worry about losing important email messages or switching applications to send messages to colleagues in different parts of the organization. In addition, with capabilities such as Conversation View in Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App, employees can more easily manage and access email messages.