Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Volvo Steers a More Competitive Course with Unified Communications
Overview
Country or Region:France
Industry:Automotive and Industrial
Customer Profile
The Volvo Group, which designs and manufactures vehicles for commercial use, employs 70,000 people at 130 locations worldwide and realized €22 billion (U.S.$30 billion) in sales for 2004.
Business Situation
Volvo wanted to improve its competitiveness through increased efficiency and productivity by revitalizing its internal communications.
Solution
By deploying Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005 and subscribing to Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Volvo improvedreal-time communications.
Benefits
Increases efficiency and productivity
Projects savings of €21.9 million the first year
Improves security
Extends the value of the Microsoft infrastructure / “Live Communications Server enables us to cover our real-time collaborative scenarios, helps us resolve the thorny problem of security…and it interacts with the other Microsoft collaborative tools….”
Claude Chanal, Technical Manager of Collaborative Products, Volvo ITFrance
The Volvo Group, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, operates in more than 130 locations worldwide. In 2000, to increase its competitiveness, the Volvo Information Technology solutioncenter in Lyon, France, began to seek solutions to improve the organization’s ability to communicate and collaborate in real time. Over a period of five years, Volvo IT deployed several software products, culminating in the deployment of Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005 to 50,000 users. In addition, Volvo IT subscribed to Microsoft Office Live Meeting and began using Microsoft Office Communicator 2005. These tools, which integrated with the organization’s existing Microsoft Windows®–based infrastructure, have increased efficiency and productivity, improved security, and extended the value of the organization’s Microsoft infrastructure, while delivering a strong return on investment.
Situation
The Volvo Group designs and manufactures vehicles for commercial use, operating Mack Trucks, Renault Trucks, Volvo Trucks, Volvo Busses, VCE, Volvo Patna, Volvo Aero, and Volvo Financial Services. The organization comprises five business units, and Volvo Information Technology (IT), with 4,000 employees, is the only business unit that covers all aspects of the group’s activity.
In 2000, Volvo IT created the Collaborative Work Solution Center (CWSC) in Lyon, France. The company placed a dedicated team of experts in the center to address the communications constraints involved in its huge multisite, multilingual organization. Volvo IT sought a comprehensive solution for real-time collaboration that would encompass presence awareness, instant messaging, online meetings, and external and internal document and idea sharing to secure a competitive advantage.
Solution
In 2001, Volvo IT deployed the shared-applications solution, the Microsoft® NetMeeting® conferencing software, which gave users a limited ability to view and work collaboratively on Microsoft Windows®–based applications. The IT group implemented the solution for 12,000 employees, using it for more than 20,000 hours of collaborative work each month. “The success of this project lay in large part with the individual and voluntary access of the collaborators,” says Claude Chanal, Technical Manager of Collaborative Products, Volvo IT France.
To achieve its aim of improving collaboration to become more competitive, Volvo took another step forward. The company subscribed to Microsoft Office Live Meeting, introduced by Microsoft to replace NetMeeting. Live Meeting offers more capabilities than the earlier product. For example, Live Meeting supports collaboration with far more people—up to thousands—while NetMeeting typically supports only a few users at one time. Live Meeting also functions better across firewalls, enabling easy collaboration externally as well as internally. Once Volvo realized the capabilities of Live Meeting, it continued to expand its use.
Live Meeting gave Volvo point-to-point application sharing, and, with public messaging tools like MSN® Messenger, the company gained instant messaging and presence awareness.The presence capability gave users the ability to determine another user’s availability for communications, and the new messaging system proved highly popular. In less than three months, Volvo had more than a thousand new users. But the popularity of instant messaging created problems, too: The organization was confronted with security issues, as people used instant messaging for personal use and thereby exposed the organization to the potential of introduced viruses.
The security issues were addressed with the deployment of Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 in May 2005. Live Communications Server 2005, which supports 50,000 users and includes public-messaging support—enabling employees to use instant-messaging (IM) solutions from such services as AOL, MSN, and Yahoo for external IM.
With the deployment of Live Communications Server 2005, Volvo completed its ensemble of real-time tools, including those for advanced instant messaging, internal and external multipoint online meetings, and document sharing.
In addition, Live Communications Server 2005 communicates with the following products: Microsoft Exchange Server2003 communication and collaboration server, the Microsoft Office Outlook®2003 messaging and collaboration client, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. To complete its communications needs, Volvo is testing Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, which synchronizes with the other software.
“Thanks to the synchronization with Outlook, a user knows not only if another user is present, but also knows—from his or her Microsoft Outlook calendar—when that person will be available,” says Chanal.
Volvo also plans to deploy the Microsoft Windows XP operating system on every desktop computer to take full advantage of collaboration capabilities provided by Live Communications Server and Live Meeting.
Benefits
Through each incremental step indeploying its real-time collaboration and communications solution, Volvo IT has helped the organization become more competitive. The organization’s efficiency and productivity have grown, and the financial advantages of collaboration have been evident from even the early deployments. With the latest real-time collaboration software, security concerns have been eased, and the organization anticipates it will continue to thrive within a Microsoft computing environment where each product builds on the others, providing a value that is greater than any one alone.
Increases Efficiency and Productivity
The deployment of its real-time collaborative solutions contributed to increased competitiveness for the Volvo Group by energizing its employees around the world. Volvo found that its Microsoft Web conferencing solutions, in particular, helped the organization accelerate business processes and increase productivity.
For example, Volvo set up co-reviews of numerical models for what Volvo terms its computer-assisted ideas (CAI) projects. “These meetings, orchestrated in real time between laboratories spread throughout the world, sometimes group more than 20 engineers at each site around a giant screen,” says Chanal. Instant messaging helps compensate for the differences in language, too. “This tool gives us the necessary detachment to analyze, translate, and respond precisely while maintaining a flow of communications in real time.”
Projects First-Year Savings of €21.5 Million
As Volvo continues to roll out tools and expand its collaborative focus, it expects to see increased savings from its software deployments. Even with its pilot project for its Live Communications Server in 2004, Volvo found its 150 users saved an estimated 430 euros (U.S.$587, based on the exchange rate on December 31, 2004) per employee per month in improved efficiency and reduced travel costs. Based on the data from the pilot, Volvo projects its rollout to more than 50,000 users will save more than 21.5 million euros (U.S.$29.4 million) in the first year of use.
Improves Security
The deployment of Live Communications Server 2005 and its support for public messaging systems has resolved many of the security issues that Volvo faced. “This new version interfaces with public messaging and thus allows us to create pathways to help secure system information,” says Chanal.
This helps prevent the introduction of viruses from outside the corporate network.
Extends the Value of the Microsoft Infrastructure
Because the real-time communications and collaboration products work together with the organization’s Microsoft Windows–based infrastructure, the net effect of the deployments has been to create a foundation that works even more effectively in concert. Because, for example, Live Communications Server is both a part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software and integrates so smoothly with Microsoft Office products and technologies, the value of those offerings is enhanced in a powerful way.
In summarizing the solution, Chanal says, “Live Communications Server enables us to cover our real-time collaborative scenarios, helps us resolve the thorny problem of security while connected to public messaging, and it interacts with the other Microsoft collaborative tools that we have already employed.”
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