At Pandora, our goal is to design and sell signature jewelry that delights the women who wear it. Our pieces are sold in more than 9,500 stores in over 90 countries; sometimes our end customers shop at our corporate-owned stores or franchises, while others seek out Pandora jewelry at other retailers. As a company, Pandora is growing—by leaps and bounds, which is a testament to the beauty and quality of the products we make. To smooth the way, we’ve taken a fresh look at how we operate. It isn’t enough anymore for our different offices to use whatever supplies, processes and technologies they have at hand. Instead, we need to grow as a single cohesive organization, putting the right support in place for our workforce so that employees worldwide stay efficient and effective in their daily work lives.
Our efforts to help employees design and market our jewelry include providing the latest technology solutions companywide. We’re using some of our new solutions to help us make sweeping changes to the way we interact with our franchisees and to transform the shopping experience for our customers. Other technology upgrades are all about incremental efficiencies.
We adopted Microsoft Office 365 a while back and find ourselves constantly benefitting from the continuing innovations that Microsoft adds. For example, we recently gave Microsoft Office 2016 a try so we could take advantage of lots of time-savers. Our geographically dispersed employees have already become enthusiastic users of the new Office Groups features, which give them an easy, organized way to share conversations, calendars and notebooks. Office Groups are easy for anyone to create, and they’re particularly effective when used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook, because everything related to a team project shows up right within Outlook, which is where I spend most of my day.
It’s even more powerful when we add in Microsoft OneNote, which may be the best app ever developed. Having a single place to put anything you think of (notes, images, jewelry design sketches, production schedules, logistical information), making it searchable, and being able to access it from any device and share access with others is pretty amazing. In fact, one of our executives used to be a strictly paper guy. He had special notebooks that he carried around everywhere. When we showed him OneNote, he immediately switched over completely, and now he uses it for everything, making his notes available to the executive team, who comment on them electronically.
It’s not just our executives who’re making faster decisions and moving the company forward. Pandora employees everywhere now use Skype for Business for instant messaging, telephony, presence and video calls. Our ability to interact visually during conference calls makes a huge difference to our communication—it’s important to be able to see facial expressions and reactions so we know if we’re connecting and understanding one another, which is especially critical because it helps bring together our teams around the world. We share desktops during these calls, which improves the teamwork because we can share our work, whether it’s a design for a new bracelet, a marketing campaign or an IT schematic. Plus, we’re saving on long-distance costs and reducing travel expenses. I’m convinced that we wouldn’t be as successful operating as a unified global company if our distributed teams couldn’t collaborate using capabilities like Office Groups and Skype for Business Online.
Employees use simplified sharing features to help keep track of document versions and work faster. For example, when I want to send out a document for review, I use cloud-based attachments, which means that my colleagues receive a link to the document in Microsoft OneDrive for Business. They don’t have copies of project plans or spreadsheets cluttering up their Inboxes. And when they click on the link, it takes them to the latest version of my document, so I can keep modifying the document even after I send the email.
I also appreciate the cross-platform functionality, touch capabilities and digital ink, because I can stay productive even when I don’t have a mouse and keyboard. I use a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, a MacBook Pro and an iPad. Office 2016 provides a seamless experience as I edit, save and share documents on any device.
We’re getting so much value from Office 365 and the new Office 2016 suite, but I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do for us. Already, we’re connecting teams, streamlining processes for increased productivity, and working more efficiently from everywhere across a range of devices. But I’m looking forward to exploring Sway for more polished reports and presentations and Outlook Clutter to help keep me focused and prioritize my email. With so many ways to save time and gain insight, we’re better able to keep pace with the demands of our growing business. That’s good news for jewelry lovers everywhere!
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
The Carlsberg Group produces and markets more than 500 brands. Following an unprecedented growth period, the company wanted to optimize global business operations, while remaining close to local markets—a new operational model it calls “GloCal.” Carlsberg is achieving this goal by using the productivity and collaboration tools in Microsoft Office 365 to connect with colleagues around the world.
J. C. Jacobsen founded his family-owned brewery more than 160 years ago to serve the Danish market. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Carlsberg Group began a period of acquisitions and global growth that today represents its biggest success—and its biggest challenge. Managing more than 500 beer brands that cater to diverse tastes and cultures around the world, the company needed to realign its organizational structure and corporate culture in a way that would help it succeed in a highly competitive global market, while staying true to loyal local customers.
Need for Global Collaboration The Carlsberg Group is organizing itself around a new operational model—called GloCal—designed to find the right balance between working together at a global level and allowing its many regional beer brands to flourish. “If we are going to be successful as a GloCal organization, we have to be more cohesive in how we do business across the world. And for that to happen, we need to enable our employees to communicate and collaborate seamlessly, no matter where they are,” says Etienne Dock, Vice President of IT Architecture and Sourcing, Carlsberg Business Solutions. “One way we are helping our employees work better together is by deploying Microsoft Office 365.”
When choosing productivity and collaboration tools, the Carlsberg Group also evaluated Google Apps for Business, but employees wanted to work in the familiar Office user interface and the IT group valued the level of integration built into the Microsoft cloud-based communication, collaboration, and social networking services. The company also felt that a Microsoft offering met its security and availability requirements. “Coming from a position where we had disjointed email services, inconsistent web conferencing tools, and isolated web portals for different countries, integration was important to us,” says Dock. “The more we grew, the more obvious was the need for a single, consistent, reliable collaboration platform.”
Optimizing Operations with Global Supply Chain
The Carlsberg Group is minimizing the significant costs of delivering beer to local markets and optimizing brewing capacity at its more than 80 breweries around the world thanks to the formation of a new subsidiary in Switzerland, the Carlsberg Supply Company (CSC) that generates global efficiencies and cost savings across the company’s vast supply chain.
“The formation of CSC points to our growing, global business agenda. Office 365 was a key IT initiative that we put in place to support this agenda,” says Dock. “Beer is heavy, so we don’t want to transport it for long distances. Breweries are capital intensive, so we don’t want to build too many. The CSC will derive huge business value from using Office 365 as a global collaboration tool to interact with our global markets and exchange the information we need to fine-tune the balance between these variables to optimize our operations and save money.”
The Carlsberg Group worked with Microsoft Services Consulting to validate the company’s overall architecture, assess the readiness of its IT infrastructure for deployment, and support the company through the migration. To promote videoconferencing usage, the Carlsberg Group posted a series of educational videos on its intranet.
Accelerating Business with Integrated Tools
The company is accelerating the pace of business through impromptu and planned videoconferences that are quickly being adopted by employees at corporate headquarters and in local offices. A recent videoconference attended by more than 100 supply chain leaders, the CEO of the Carlsberg Group, and several members of the board successfully communicated the CSC three-year strategic plan to a global audience in under two hours. “Not only did we broadcast our strategy to a global audience, but we gained feedback from participants through a Q and A session and a poll asking if this was a useful way to share information. The majority of responses were favorable,” says Werner K. Budek, PhD, Vice President, Strategy at Carlsberg Supply Company. “It would have taken us three weeks to travel around the world to meet and greet everyone on that call. Sharing knowledge online is one way we are improving efficiency and boosting business agility.”
Personal productivity is also on the rise, thanks to anytime, anywhere access to documents that are automatically synced between different devices. When employees have everything they need at their fingertips, the pace of business accelerates. “I’m on the road frequently and I carry at least two phones, one laptop, and a tablet,” says David Fang, Corporate Affairs Vice President, Asia, at the Carlsberg Group. “Now I can access all my email and documents with any of my devices, so I can get work done quickly without worrying about technical issues.”
“We are currently testing online data storage and anticipate that when we roll it out, users will benefit from secure access to their documents anywhere they have Internet connectivity,” adds Dock.
When the Carlsberg Group quietly launched its new enterprise social network, employees in the Product Innovation Group discovered it themselves and began sharing ideas to innovate.
“People are using Yammer to discuss innovative packaging concepts, more inviting store displays, and new technologies for beer cans,” says Anders Munck, Enterprise Architect at the Carlsberg Group. “Compared with an official innovation system, it’s so easy to get involved. Already we are seeing ideas flowing all over the company.”
Local Presence, Global Family
The Carlsberg Group is benefiting from increased knowledge of regional markets because sales representatives who are out all day meeting customers at bars, pubs, and restaurants can use their smartphones to connect and share information with colleagues and management directly from the field. This flow of information enriches the company’s understanding of regional markets. “The local flavor of our beer is a huge part of our value, so the more we learn about our customers in different parts of the world, the better we can satisfy their unique tastes,” says Dock.
Today, the Carlsberg Group is much closer to becoming a true GloCal organization. With user-friendly tools and an enterprise social networking platform that opens up the lines of communication via any device anywhere, the company is breaking down business silos to achieve what the Carlsberg Group defines as a true “family of brands in a world of diversity.”
“Because employees around the world are working and communicating better together, we can satisfy customers at less cost,” says Dock. “That’s because we gain the efficiencies of business done on a global scale, while staying close to our local markets. Thanks to Office 365, we’re becoming a true GloCal organization.”
The Technologies Involved
Most employees at the Carlsberg Group use the Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E3 plan. This plan includes Office 365 ProPlus, the familiar Office desktop suite, which employees can download on more than five devices and work productively with synced files on all of them. Employees use Microsoft Exchange Online for email and calendaring and Microsoft Lync Online to connect via web conferencing and instant messaging. Virtual teams are beginning to adopt Microsoft SharePoint Online to collaborate on projects, and employees are adopting the Yammer enterprise social networking platform for messaging and collaboration on product innovation. And when the company deploys OneDrive for Business for online document storage, employees will be able to access the latest version of their files on any device anywhere.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
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McClone Logo
McClone Construction Company: Construction firm unites workforce, speeds pace of business with cloud services
McClone Construction builds concrete structures throughout the United States, which requires seamless work among dispersed teams. The company standardized on Microsoft Office 365 to support close collaboration through frequent video calls, easy access to email and calendars, and a consistent experience across devices. It has increased employee productivity and flexibility, so it can tackle more projects while maintaining its high standard of work.
A solid foundation for business success
From parking garages and reservoirs to hospitals and universities, McClone Construction knows concrete. The California-based company has spent 40 years building structures throughout the United States, gradually expanding its offices to Washington, Hawaii, Colorado, and Texas. Along the way, the company has fostered a tradition of excellence, not just in its projects but also in its culture of teamwork and continuous improvement.
McClone Construction recently moved from a divisional business model to an integrated operation so that it could take greater advantage of employees’ skill sets to form teams based on a project’s location and type of work. “Ours is a cyclical business, and when one office is slow, another is often too busy to handle all the projects coming its way,” says Rick Owens, Project/IT Manager at McClone Construction. “By connecting our offices, we can tackle projects more effectively and achieve greater success as a comprehensive organization.”
Merging resources meant that the company needed to unify business processes across its former divisions. “In the past, engineers in our divisions used different ways of designing form systems, project managers followed their own methodologies, and workflows varied among teams,” says Owens. “We knew that uniting processes throughout the company would demand a lot more collaboration across offices than we’d ever done before.”
A new collaboration paradigm
Fostering the collaboration now expected of employees required giving them common technology. The company’s divisions used a range of technology systems, so McClone Construction looked to simplify. It wanted a solution that would be easy to use and straightforward to administrate, one that included the videoconferencing, messaging, and productivity software needed for efficient collaboration among dispersed colleagues. “In the past, we didn’t have much need to work across our offices, but the change in our business model caused us to take a careful look at how we could collaborate,” says Owens.
As McClone Construction looked at the available technology choices, it also examined the solutions that it already had in place throughout its divisions. The company found that one division had adopted Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based services when the division replaced its aging in-house messaging infrastructure. “We already knew many of the ways in which Office 365 could help the company at large because our Northwest Division had experience with it,” says Owens. “For instance, we liked using Microsoft Exchange Online so that we could avoid all the time-consuming system management that we’d endured in the past. But the biggest draw for companywide adoption was Skype for Business Online. We saw how it would give us video-calling and screen-sharing capabilities that would make it easier to conduct effective virtual meetings, without a lot of hassle to set them up.”
Employees have embraced video calling to such an extent that McClone Construction has reduced costs. Says Owens, “We’ve already seen a savings of at least 10 percent in our mobile phone costs, plus a 5 percent reduction in travel between offices, especially among upper management.”
Greater productivity from anywhere
Using Office 365 helps McClone Construction be more agile as it juggles projects across the company. “It’s much easier to establish a Skype for Business online call than to track down team members on their mobile phones,” says Owens. “We use the presence indicator to see who’s available and then just click to talk. Quickly finding project superintendents in the field and getting information to and from them without delays accelerates our pace of business.”
The company has found that its virtual meetings to coordinate operations among its widespread offices are more effective now, due to the use of video calls rather than audio conference calls. “There’s just something about seeing the people you’re talking to,” says Owens. “It’s the closest you can get to an in-person meeting. Using Skype for Business Online, we see colleagues’ expressions and gain a better understanding of the issues. We can get more done in less time because we also share screens so we’re all looking at the same materials.”
McClone Construction and its partners use Microsoft SharePoint Online to share information between companies. Internally, employees use it to maintain project team calendars and a single, easily accessible repository for engineering documentation.
In addition, employees use Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus and therefore have the same Microsoft Office programs available for use on a range of devices, including Windows Phones and Microsoft Surface Pro 3 devices. Owens, for example, might work on project plans on his PC at the office, make changes to it from home on his Microsoft Surface Pro 3, and review colleagues’ subsequent revisions from his smartphone on the way into the office. “Our employees can install Office programs on up to five devices, which really helps them stay productive when mobile,” says Owens. “Our executives and managers in particular use programs such as Microsoft OneNote Online extensively.”
Overall, Owens believes that the Office 365 components’ built-in efficiencies have the greatest impact on the company’s increased productivity. “We’ve significantly broadened our communication channels due to the Office 365 capabilities that are now at our fingertips,” says Owens. “Plus, Microsoft constantly expands Office 365 functionality, and we get the immediate benefit from product improvements because we don’t have to wait for the next upgrade cycle to take advantage.”
Support for business growth
McClone Construction appreciates that using Office 365 makes it easier to add and remove employees as the company changes. “Right now we’re experiencing significant growth that creates daily IT challenges, but we’re able to onboard new employees right away, giving them what they need to immediately work together no matter where they’re located, rather than taking days to get set up,” says Owens. “And if we opt to open a new office, getting that new area up and running will take approximately half the time that it took before, from a technology perspective. We’re no longer limited by technology—instead, we’re using Office 365 to become a more flexible, adaptable, successful organization.”
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Watch how a racing team turns to cloud services for speed and agility on and off the track
Lotus F1 Team is all about efficiency for both its race cars and its internal operations. The organization adopted Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools to improve its communications and collaboration capabilities, even during the critical seconds of a race. Employees and IT staff now spend less time dealing with technology, which leaves them available to focus on how to trim seconds off every lap around the track.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
Ariela Suster’s company has one bold goal, to employ at-risk youth in El Salvador giving them an alternative to a culture of violence and gangs. She uses Skype on her Surface to stay connected with her team, designs new jewelry lines with Surface Pen, and manages her books using Microsoft Office and other full desktop software.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
Real-estate firm uses CRM solution to manage data for greater efficiency and insight
Granite Properties acquires, develops, leases, and manages prime commercial properties in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston. The company needed more effective information management practices to free employees’ time and improve business visibility. After examining several customer relationship management options, Granite Properties chose to implement Real Estate Advantage, which is targeted at the commercial real-estate industry and based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Granite Properties rolled out the solution to its investment group and is working on tailored deployments for its leasing and operations groups. Employees enjoy the way the solution works with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, provides real-time data through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and eliminates duplicate data entry and time-consuming tasks.
Situation
Established in 1991, Granite Properties owns and manages a portfolio of office, retail, and industrial space in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston totaling more than 10.5 million square feet. As an owner-operator, Granite Properties’s activities revolve around the acquisition, development, leasing, and management of its assets.
The company’s investments group seeks out opportunities for development and acquisition and has made over U.S.$2.6 billion in property investments since the company’s inception. The construction group supervises build-to-suit and finishing of spaces, and the leasing group works with peers in the industry to find tenants for those spaces. In recent years, Granite Properties has closed more than 250 lease transactions, ranging from 1,000-square-feet leases to deals involving upwards of 200,000 square feet. In addition, the company’s operations group manages the properties and oversees accounting, risk management, and technology.
As the firm grew in geography and assets, Granite Properties needed to systematize how employees managed information about buildings and leases. “Information management was an acute problem in our investments team, which is comprised of about 12 people who identify and acquire new properties,” explains Craig Scullin, Manager of Information Systems at Granite Properties. “People used their email accounts as digital filing cabinets, and some recorded critical information in paper documents. This made pulling together comprehensive reports a difficult and time-consuming process.”
Managers tracked key indicators of business performance by collecting information in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheets, such as turnover rates and the ability to close investment deals. However, this process was susceptible to error and employees could not easily determine if data in the spreadsheets was up-to-date. And, because of the decentralized nature of the process, managers could not easily do a side-by-side comparison of data coming from different cities.
“We couldn’t get an all-up summary of these reports based in Office Excel 2007, and one report didn’t update another, which meant a lot of duplicate work for our team members,” explains Scullin. “Our company management considered implementing a customer relationship management system, but was skeptical that popular offerings could adequately meet our requirements without significant customization.”
The investments department worked closely with the IT group to find an appropriate customer relationship management solution that would meet the company’s business and technology needs. Specifically, Granite Properties was looking for a solution that met the following criteria.
A shallow learning curve
“Many of our brokers are nontechnical folks who are very comfortable with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007,” says Scullin. “We needed to win support among employees, so we sought a solution that would work well with Office Outlook 2007 and offer clear benefits for people who use it.”
An open architecture
Granite Properties sought a solution that could integrate with its JD Edwards financial management software. “We wanted to make information from JD Edwards available directly in the customer relationship management solution,” says Scullin. “Our employees often need information on leases from the JD Edwards system but are not confident navigating it.”
A single version of the truth
Granite Properties wanted to use the customer relationship management solution to standardize how it defined terms like “occupancy” across the company.
A solution based on Microsoft SQL Server
The company wanted to take advantage of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. “Our technology vision involves using SQL Server Reporting Services as a business intelligence platform for the company,” explains Scullin. “We didn’t want to have to write the same report in different systems.”
Solution
The IT group at Granite Properties considered several customer relationship management offerings from Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel, Netage Solutions, and other vendors. Early on, the group decided against the offering from Oracle (Siebel CRM) because of the lack of real-estate-specific functionality. While investigating Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Granite Properties found out about Real Estate Advantage, which is based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and adds functionality specific to the commercial real-estate industry.
Granite Properties implemented the new solution, but spent a considerable effort beforehand documenting business processes and user needs. “We took advantage of the customer relationship management project to map out our process flows and standardize our business based on what we decided were best practices,” says Scullin.
Deploying the solution
Including the time spent working on business processes, Granite Properties was able to implement the solution in seven months. The company took advantage of the multitenant architecture of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create a distinct application for its investments group and plans to do the same for its leasing, development, and operations groups. This approach provides a tailored experience for individual roles that helps improve user acceptance and productivity.
“Microsoft Dynamics CRM is flexible and lets us easily customize applications for each of our groups while working from the same platform,” explains Scullin. “All the information will be housed in the same data store, but our employees will only see the information and functionality that is relevant to their group.”
With Real Estate Advantage rolled out to 12 users on its investments team, Granite Properties is working on additional deployments for the company’s leasing group, which will cover an additional 10 users, and development and operations groups, which will include up to 40 additional users. The overarching theme for these deployments is managing information about tenants, brokers, and properties on a companywide basis.
“Each application will help individuals and teams work more efficiently,” says Scullin. “But, the larger benefit will be visibility across the company. People will be able to see the progress of development projects and what the discussions during the leasing phase were like for a particular tenant. Visibility across all our operations will help us serve tenants better.”
Currently, Granite Properties is preparing Real Estate Advantage for deployment in its leasing group by gathering contacts that employees have stored in Office Outlook 2007 and their mobile devices. “We’re putting all the information and functionality that our leasing agents need into the application,” says Scullin. “For example, we’re integrating the solution with our JD Edwards application so that brokers don’t need to log on to that system to work on a contract. Instead, they will have everything they need in a single tool.”
Using workflow, business intelligence, and mapping
Looking ahead, Granite Properties plans to use the Action Plans feature in Real Estate Advantage to automate workflow processes, such as lease approvals. “The idea with Action Plans is that when employees initiate a lease agreement, the system will automatically assign tasks with deadlines and update the dashboard on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,” says Scullin.
Granite Properties uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to distribute reports and real-time business intelligence that is pulled from the Real Estate Advantage solution and the JD Edwards financial management software. The company set up a variety of real-time reports in SQL Server Reporting Services that automatically pull together information that previously took several days to collect.
Employees can also view graphic representations of key performance indicators on their Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards, with information updated as it is entered into Real Estate Advantage. If they want to investigate a trend or abnormal metric, employees can click on the chart or graph to drill down into the underlying records for a particular asset or deal.
The investments team at Granite Properties enjoys the integration of Bing Maps in Real Estate Advantage, which lets team members easily investigate potential investment properties in other cities. From within the application, they can view properties from various aspects, such as hybrid, bird’s eye, and street-level views, and layers of data on the map, such as nearby banks and schools.
Benefits
In Real Estate Advantage, Granite Properties found a customer relationship management solution aimed at the commercial real-estate industry that is easy to learn and use, supports the use of standardized best practices, and fits with the company’s existing IT infrastructure. “Implementing and using Real Estate Advantage has been a bit like using a TV remote for the first time,” says Scullin. “When you start using it, you wonder how you ever lived without it. This customer relationship management project was absolutely critical for our company and will help us capture future opportunities.”
Companywide visibility
Information flows unimpeded throughout Granite Properties so that employees have an up-to-date view of activities in another group. The company takes advantage of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SQL Server Reporting Services to provide real-time reporting and business intelligence to people so that they can make better-informed decisions.
“Critical information is no longer obscured. If we have the same client in different cities, we know about it and can negotiate the best deal possible,” says Scullin.
Because data is entered into the system only once and stored in a single location, Granite Properties can more easily maintain a single version of the truth. As Scullin notes, “We no longer need to remember to update our spreadsheets or remember where a particular set of information is stored. Everyone across teams and geographies is looking at the same data.”
Fast user adoption
Granite Properties appreciates that Real Estate Advantage works well with Office Outlook 2007, which many employees at the company rely on to complete work every day. “When we were still in the exploratory stage, what impressed our team members the most about Real Estate Advantage was how it worked just like Office Outlook 2007,” says Scullin. “And, after we implemented the solution, people intuitively understood how to navigate and use the solution, so the learning curve was low and adoption was good.”
Because of the technical flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the IT team at Granite Properties was able to quickly adjust the user interface in response to requests, which also helped increase acceptance among employees. Employees in the investments group also appreciate the integration of Bing Maps directly in the user interface, which enables them to check out properties before physically visiting the sites. “Bing Maps brought a lot of ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ from our employees,” says Scullin.
Greater productivity
Real Estate Advantage gives employees at Granite Properties powerful new tools to help them increase productivity. For example, the investments group used to spend two days each month pulling together Office Excel 2007–based reports. Now, employees can generate these reports on demand in just seconds.
Once or twice each year, the investments group would research market data and other data sources to create larger reports. Says Scullin, “Although these jobs still require some investigation, employees can draw 90 percent of the information directly from SQL Server Reporting Services, which makes the process much faster.”
On a day-to-day basis, employees use Real Estate Advantage to retrieve information that they previously might have asked other people to collect for them. “The solution is changing the way we do things, and it’s all for the better,” says Scullin. “It’s helping us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively.”
Integrated CRM solution helps Trek support local sales reps
Although it's a global leader in bicycles and related gear, Trek Bicycle maintains the spirit of a small company, from its close-knit, collaborative staff to the independent bike shops who sell Trek bikes and gear. Because it sells through a network of smaller, independently owned retailers rather than big-box sporting goods stores, Trek's success depends on close, supportive relationships between its local sales reps and the owners of the stores. Trek uses Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to support their local sales reps and build relationships with their customers.
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For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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Nonprofit moves to Office 365 and SharePoint Online to improve income generation
As written by Fiona Knower, Office Manager, British Ballet Organization as written on https://blogs.office.com
The British Ballet Organization (BBO) trains students and teachers in the globally respected BBO syllabi. As a nonprofit organization, we organize courses and events locally, nationally, and internationally to enrich lives through the medium of dance. Working on these events was a challenge because we had limited collaboration tools. We had a shared file server running on an old PC in the office, and I worried about losing teacher, student, and event management information if a backup failed. When we worked on documents, versioning was always a nightmare, so we ended up sending drafts to one another by email. It wasn’t very efficient.
Then we heard about Microsoft Office 365. I saw how we could use SharePoint Online and team sites as a security-enhanced, easily accessible collaboration platform. We deployed Office 365 and now we can coauthor documents simultaneously, track versions accurately, and store our data with robust security in the cloud. Because we can access our work from any PC, laptop, or mobile phone- wherever we have an Internet connection-we are no longer restricted to meetings in the office to get things done. With Office 365, we can work more productively on more events and reinvest more money into the organization!”
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
