Customer Solution Brief s1

"Because of the intuitive design of Office 2010, we’ve found features we never knew were there before. The good stuff is front and center, so we’re getting more out of our applications."

Jude Pealing, Bagshaws IT Manager

Founded in 1871, Bagshaws is a highly respected auction firm that provides surveying and valuation of country homes, commercial farms, and livestock. The IT division offers outsourced technical support to farmers, allowing them to computerize farm records and stay compliant with government regulations.

Bagshaws has built a reputation as one of the most trusted auctioneers in the UK. The company is known for offering desirable estates, farms, and livestock at auction.

To streamline the production of documents and graphical materials and improve efficiency of communications, the company sought a more efficient and feature-rich applications suite. By deploying Microsoft® Office 2010, Bagshaws has enjoyed a higher level of productivity and consistently exceeds service standards.

Situation

Since 2002, Jude Pealing has managed Bagshaws’ IT division, a farm records bureau and consultancy department. Her primary role is managing all clients’ farm records and ensuring compliance with farming regulations. She is often tasked with coordinating the schedules of colleagues, farmers, and third-party vendors.

The marketing department creates a high volume of presentations, brochures, newsletters, and other documents. Adding animation and graphics often required the use of third-party image editing tools.

As Land Agents, Bagshaws are often tasked with authoring legal agreements for clients. It’s important that these documents reflect the most recent legislation. With people from three different offices working on the same documents, the process often took up to a week, delaying the delivery of time-sensitive documents.

Solution

To increase the efficiency of email and scheduling, promote document collaboration, and streamline the production of professional-quality materials, Bagshaws upgraded to Office 2010. Building on the strengths of previous versions, the new applications suite has the power and innovation to help the company’s employees do their jobs better and faster.

After upgrading to Office 2010, Bagshaws has increased internal efficiency and expedited the creation of legal documents, brochures, and presentations. The more intuitive Microsoft Outlook has greatly reduced the amount of time spent interacting with emails and calendars.

“Because of the intuitive design of Office 2010, we’ve found features we never knew were there before,” notes IT Manager Pealing. “The good stuff is front and center, so we’re getting more out of our applications.”

Communicating Better & Faster

Scheduling challenges are a thing of the past with the enhanced calendar features in Outlook 2010. Pealing likes the ability to preview a group of calendars, making it easier to coordinate busy schedules. Instead of spending 40 minutes per month scheduling emails, she now spends only about 20 minutes—a savings of 240 minutes per year. She also appreciates the ability to schedule emails directly from an email.

“I love how we can see two or three different calendars at once—the level of detail is extremely helpful,” Pealing points out. “Scheduling is so much more efficient.”

The Conversation View has completely transformed the way Pealing and her team manage their inboxes, saving up to 30% of the time spent searching for and sorting emails.

Professional Documents Made Simple

With the new version of Microsoft Word, users can more easily produce brochures and other marketing materials without third-party editing software. The new image editing capabilities allow for the resizing, cropping, and enhancement of graphics, speeding up brochure production by 50%.

“Word’s new image editing capabilities have revolutionized the way we create our marketing collateral,” notes Pealing. “It’s truly one-stop editing.”

With the new version of Microsoft PowerPoint®, users have noticed significant improvements in speed and accessibility. The built-in screen capture tool allows them to easily add graphics to a presentation, and the improved, thumbnail-style animation menu makes adding effects virtually effortless. Additional capabilities are provided by the enhanced slide transitions and Word Art effects.

Workflow that Truly Flows

With the new co-authoring* capability, the company has completely changed their approach to producing legal documents. “Our clients rely on us to keep all legal documents up-to-date with the most current legislation,” says Pealing. “The new co-authoring tool lets us make modifications much faster.”

Multiple users can now make edits to the same documents simultaneously. With four people working on the same document from three separate offices, Bagshaws has seen a savings of four days per two-week period, allowing them to distribute time-sensitive documents faster.

Less Time & Complexity, More Progress

In previous versions of Office, essential features weren’t as accessible and were easily overlooked. With the intuitive Backstage® menu in 2010, Bagshaws has eliminated up to 15 minutes per day―a full 60 hours per year―that was previously spent interacting with menus and searching for commands.

“I love how Office 2010 makes it so easy to get to the functions we need. Everything is more user-friendly. I rarely need to use Help anymore—everything is self-explanatory,” says Pealing.

Based on the vast improvements the company has seen in the relatively short amount of time since implementing Office 2010, Bagshaws expects efficiency and productivity to soar as they continue to explore the system’s capabilities.

* Co-authoring capabilities require either Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation Services or a free Windows Live account.