“Employees won’t need to search far and wide for information … they can access it quickly and get answers to customers faster.”

Becky Carlson, Customer Service Supervisor, Hexcel Corporation

Hexcel is a leading manufacturer of advanced structural materials. The company was experiencing growth across all market segments and wanted to revitalize its clunky intranet to help its more than 4,000 workers find answers faster. Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as its new intranet foundation, Hexcel hopes to realize easier publishing, instant information access, faster resolution of customer issues, and reduced IT support needs.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published December 2006


Business Needs

Hexcel, headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, is a leading advanced structural materials company. Its lightweight, high-performance reinforcement products and composite materials and structures are purchased by organizations as diverse as aircraft manufacturers and sporting goods companies. Hexcel employs about 4,500 people worldwide and has annual revenues of more than U.S.$1 billion.

As Hexcel experienced growth across its diverse markets, the customer service department found it challenging to keep up with rapidly expanding customer needs. In 2001, Hexcel created an intranet, called HexLink, to give employees a single place to access product, customer, and company information. Employees found HexLink difficult to use, however, and didn’t update it very often. The staler HexLink grew, the less useful it became. HexLink’s document management functions were limited, so employees bypassed the intranet by routing documents to one another as e-mail attachments and storing documents in file shares. This created versioning problems and put workers right back where they were before HexLink.

Apart from its publishing difficulties, HexLink had no search or collaboration capabilities—just lists of Web links. To find information, employees resorted to phoning, sending e-mail messages, and visiting colleagues in person. Also, users were overly dependent on the IT staff to manage and secure the site. Setting a simple user authorization required the submission of an IT help-desk ticket, which took at least an hour, and sometimes a full day, to process.

All these delays translated to slower responses to customers. “With our customer base expanding rapidly, we had to find a way to speed problem resolution,” says Becky Carlson, Customer Service Supervisor for Hexcel.

Solution

Hexcel wanted to transform HexLink into the valuable business tool it was meant to be—a tool that would enable employees to publish and find information quickly without incurring exorbitant support costs. In the summer of 2006, Hexcel partnered with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Avanade to reengineer the U.S. customer service section of HexLink using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “Our customer service department is a major resource for all other departments in customer interactions, and we thought that using the document management and search capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 would help us improve our employees’ ability to publish, find, and reuse information,” says Raul Mital, Data Technology Project Leader for Hexcel.

The IT staff contracted with Avanade to help migrate the customer service pages of HexLink to an Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. Within two months, the team had a functioning site. “Having content management and collaboration functionality built into Office SharePoint Server 2007 made a big difference to our development speed,” says John Alioto, Director of .NET Practice for Avanade’s Northern California region.

When users want to publish information to HexLink, they make a request within Office SharePoint Server 2007, which will process the request automatically, authenticating users through the Active Directory® service, part of the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system. There is no need to involve the IT staff. Authors will be able to set access permissions at the group, user, and even document levels.

Instead of sending documents as e-mail attachments, team members will be able to check documents in and out of Office SharePoint Server 2007 document libraries (stored in a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database) that have automatic version control. “Version control will help me avoid time-consuming document archiving,” Carlson says. “In the past, I’ve wasted entire days rifling through e-mails and file folders looking for information, while major customers are waiting for answers.”

Benefits

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, Hexcel has been able to create a vibrant pilot intranet that will save time for employees who respond to customers, give Hexcel a central place to store knowledge, reduce IT involvement, and reduce support needs.

n  Faster answers for customers. The ultimate beneficiaries of an up-to-date intranet are Hexcel customers. “Employees won’t need to search far and wide for information; accurate content is stored in Office SharePoint Server 2007, where they can access it quickly and get answers to customers faster,” Carlson says.

n  One place for intellectual assets. “Instead of having accumulated corporate knowledge scattered all over the place, we will have everything in one place for easy access,” Carlson adds. “We won’t need to solve problems repeatedly; we can take advantage of work already done.”

n  Easier posting of intranet content. Because it’s so much easier to post content to HexLink, Hexcel expects 30 percent more authors to post and update content, which will keep the site fresher. “Our customer service representatives will have access to more, and more-current, information, which will increase the effectiveness of their customer interactions,” says Mital.

Also, the ability to set security at the document level will allow Hexcel employees to post documents with restricted access due to confidentiality or regulatory requirements.

n  Reduced support needs. Hexcel expects to see a 50 percent reduction in time needed to upload and revise documents, giving staff members more time to spend with customers. Also, the IT staff won’t have to be involved with low-level intranet management issues, as departments will be able to set and manage their own security policies. “My staff will be able to redirect intranet help-desk time to rolling out new solutions,” Mital says.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published December 2006