Customer Solution Case Study
/ / For Investment Firm, Centralized Document Management Cuts Costs, Improves Workflow
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Financial services—Capital and securities industries
Customer Profile
Based in Chicago, Illinois, Wrightwood Capital is a real-estate finance company with U.S.$5billion in capital investments. The company has seven offices across the United States and 100 employees.
Business Situation
Wrightwood Capital worked with decentralized document management processes that slowed service delivery and increased costs. The firm wanted to improve the control and efficiency of document handling.
Solution
To improve efficiency and cut costs, Wrightwood Capital, with help from RightPoint Consulting, implemented a Web-based solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Benefits
Improves workflow efficiency
Is expected to cut annual costs by more than $100,000
Simplifies the management of document handling
Helps the business grow / “Finding the right people, locating documents, and identifying the correct versions could take days. But with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the process literally went from days to minutes.”
John Ahlberg, Chief Information Officer, Wrightwood Capital
Wrightwood Capital, a real-estate finance and investment company, was using manual data-handling processes to close deals. It could take employees days to find documents, and the company incurred rising payroll, hardware, and service costs to cope with the growing volume of information. The company decided to automate its document-handling processes with help from RightPoint Consulting and a solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. As a result, the company has improved workflow efficiency and expects to cut annual costs by more than U.S.$100,000. The solution is easy to use and support. And because employees are spending less time managing information, they can conduct business faster and close more deals.
Situation
Wrightwood Capital is a real-estate finance and investment company based in Chicago, Illinois. With seven offices and 100 employees nationwide, the company offers structured finance, mezzanine debt and equity, and industrial programs to commercial real-estate borrowers. It has more than 200 customers and approximately U.S.$5 billion in capital invested.
A company with a strong entrepreneurial focus, Wrightwood strives to provide creative financial solutions tailored to each customer’s unique business needs. However, thetransactions that helped people pursue business opportunities represented hours of cumbersome data-handling processes and a complex workflow.
Wrightwood can have 150 deals or transactions open simultaneously, and typically concludes more than 470 annually. Each deal moves through multiple stages, involving up to six departments, various external partners, and dozens of documents. The business process itself was complicated, but decentralized data-handling processes added another level of complexity. If an employee was lucky, he or she could find a document by searching on a shared file server. Often, however, the information was stored in a specific department directory or on personal computers. In that case, the information could be retrieved only by contacting the document owner by phone or e-mail.
But the problem didn’t end when the information was located. Employees then had to ensure that they had the most current version of a document, which typically involved another exchange of e-mail messages and phone calls to track down all the document owners. Because each deal requires up to 100 documents, the process was time-consuming and frustrating. It was also nearly impossible to provide a clear audit trail later.
The decentralized data-handling procedures were costly as well. The company paid two full-time employees to collect and store information when a deal closed. Also, employees working on deals printed hard copies and used expensive couriers to send documents to external partners, who lacked access to the corporate network. Finally, costs increased with the volume of data. Thecompany had more than 230,000 files and 205 gigabytes of information stored onthe main file server alone. Without a defined retention policy, the company had no choice but to add more storage hardware as records proliferated.
Wrightwood managers asked the IT team to organize the information, but John Ahlberg, Chief Information Officer at Wrightwood Capital, determined that the company needed a new solution. “We looked at the amount of data and realized that organizing and establishing ownership of thousands of documents would take too long,” he says.
Instead, the company looked for a solution that it could use to manage all deal-related documents in a central location. It wanted to improve workflow efficiency and ensure that employees worked with the most current versions of documents.
Solution
Wrightwood had already created a concept called the “Deal Room,” which identified thedocuments and departments needed foreach transaction. The company next needed a tool to implement the concept. In April 2008, Wrightwood asked RightPoint Consulting, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to build a corporate intranet based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. RightPoint, aware of its customer’s struggles with document management, suggested alsousing Office SharePoint Server 2007 for the Deal Room.
“SharePoint Server was such an obvious fit because it does an amazing job of document management,” says Ross Freedman, Cofounder of RightPoint Consulting. “It has inherent check-in, check-out, publish capabilities, and document versioning. It also has extraordinarily detailed security, both at the deal level and across deals.”
Wrightwood agreed that Office SharePoint Server 2007, with its flexibility and collaboration features, would be an ideal business solution. “We have a very entrepreneurial environment, and we need to be nimble on the technology side,” says Ahlberg. “When people here think of new ways to work with information, we need to have the right systems in place to respond immediately. SharePoint Server 2007 appealed to us because it gives us that agility.”
Plans for the project began to take shape in April 2008, and the new Web-based solution was fully deployed by the end of that year. Working from the Deal Room concept, RightPoint defined a process that included an end-to-end life cycle for each type of document involved in a transaction. Then it created a virtual Deal Room based on Office SharePoint Server 2007, and, to establish user permissions, Wrightwood integrated the application with the corporate Active Directory® service in the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. Next, Wrightwood integrated the application with Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Enterprise Edition so that it could securely manage Internet-based access by external partners and employees working outside the corporate firewall.
The solution includes Office SharePoint Server 2007, Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, and Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition data management software installed on separate Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers running Windows Server 2003. The solution is integrated with Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. Ahlberg says that deployment was even easier than expected. “Deployment of SharePoint Server 2007 was so smooth that we didn’t have to read up and invest in preparation time. There was no drama.”
The solution is equally easy to use. When authorized people click the Deal Room hyperlink, they see a deal roster listing transactions and those who have access to them. The list includes more than employees; unlike before, Wrightwood can give external users direct access to information as needed. People can then work with the roster information in multiple ways. For example, they can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 sorting and filtering features to show data such as deals above a certain dollar amount, or which deals are connected to a specific underwriter. The roster also links each deal to a page with more details, including a summary, contacts, linked documents, and an audit trail that shows every document interaction.
The Deal Room is available to all Wrightwood employees, who started using it in early 2009. Both end users and administrators required little training, and now most of the deployment effort has shifted to migrating the documents from approximately 140 active deals to the new system. The migration is expected to take about six months, and all new projects will be entered directly into the Deal Room as they kick off.
Benefits
Wrightwood employees are using the Deal Room to automate processes and work more efficiently. The improved efficiency is helping the company reduce costs and ease management. Finally, Wrightwood employees now have more time available to close deals.
Improves Workflow Efficiency
Before, employees had to interrupt their workflow to track down the documents needed for each deal. “Finding the right people, locating documents, and identifying the correct versions could take days,” says Ahlberg. “But with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the process literally went from days tominutes.”
Collaboration is also easier because employees can take advantage of built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archive processes. Ahlberg says, “Using SharePoint Server 2007 to automate the review process adds more value to our work life; we can avoid the multiple phone calls and e-mail messages we needed before.”
Freedman adds, “The SharePoint Server 2007 infrastructure enables Wrightwood employees to come to one place for information about projects. It’s all about increasing the level of efficiency and doing more with less.”
Is Expected to Cut Annual Costs by More Than $100,000
Although Wrightwood is just starting to use its new solution, it expects to realize considerable annual savings from it. For example, before banks and other external partners had Web-based access to the Deal Room site, Wrightwood used costly courier services to send files too large to send in e-mail. “We estimate that by using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to share documents directly with banks and other outside partners, we can save $100,000 or more in courier costs each year,” Ahlberg says.
The company will also use employee resources better. By automating document management with Office SharePoint Server 2007, Wrightwood can reassign two full-time employees to more valuable projects. “Instead of two people managing documents manually, one person can handle the process in a fraction of the time with SharePoint Server 2007,” Ahlberg says. “And that person’s role will be more project oriented and focused on improving the site.”
Simplifies the Management of DocumentHandling
Business benefits are only part of the advantages of the new solution; it is also easy to manage. “Because my team administers the SharePoint Server 2007 solution, it was appealing to me that we didn’t need to hire someone with specialized skills to manage it,” says Ahlberg.
He adds that his job is also easier because end users can make changes to the site and improve processes themselves. “The beauty of the SharePoint Server 2007 solution is that it is so easy to use and support,” says Ahlberg. “Office administrators, not just IT staff, can make changes. It’s intuitive enough that we were able to adopt easily a new piece of technology.”
Helps the Business Grow
Wrightwood realized that it had reached thelimit of its existing technology for managing workflow and documents when business leaped from millions of dollars to more than 1billion dollars in investments. “We needed to automate our processes to work more effectively as business grew,” says Ahlberg. “We can do business faster and close more deals with SharePoint Server 2007 because our people spend less time managing information.”
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