About VECCI
The Victorian Employers' Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI) is Victoria 's most influential employer group, servicing Victorian businesses. An independent, non-government body, VECCI was founded by the business community 156 years ago to represent business.
Its membership base is diverse, with involvement from all levels and sectors of industry including: business services, hospitality, manufacturing, retail, tourism and emerging sectors. Members range from large corporations down to mum and dad small businesses.
VECCI represents the interests of business at a State level as well as nationally, acting as a sounding board for government decision-making and as an instrument of active lobbying. VECCI also offers a range of consulting and training services to its members.
ECCI has 17 offices across Victoria with 220 staff.
Problem
Like many organisations, VECCI was facing the challenge of how to manage growing amounts of electronic information and data. It needed a consistent and common way to find data, while reducing the number of systems it operated.
VECCI also needed a way of more effectively managing and sharing knowledge among its distributed offices and allowing collaboration between team members.
Solution
Daniel Howarth, VECCI's IT Manager, decided on an intranet and portal to address these challenges, and as it was already a significant user of Microsoft Business Solutions such as Dynamics GP, selected Microsoft SharePoint as its platform.
“Having discussed the options with Professional Advantage, our Microsoft Dynamics support partner, we opted for SharePoint as we have a high level of comfort with Microsoft and it was also very inexpensive. Having been involved in intranet development in the past I had a good idea of the costs and timeframes involved with alternative approaches, so selecting SharePoint really was a bit of a no-brainer,” said Howarth.
The Implementation
While initially VECCI was self-sufficient implementing SharePoint portal, in the later stages of the project, the company engaged Professional Advantage to assist with the development of the document management solution for its legal practice and the integration with Microsoft CRM.
“One of the really great things about SharePoint is its simplicity. We were able to do the initial implementation for very little cost apart from the internal effort. The growing adoption of SharePoint within VECCI is aided by the fact that no programming is required and anyone can easily add content,” said Howarth.
VECCI's use of SharePoint has grown and evolved since its initial use in mid-2005. To begin with, SharePoint was used as a portal for applications such as timesheets and systems to track issues. It has grown to 22 team sites and is still growing, with users starting to increasingly take advantage of online collaboration functionality.
Central Point of Access for Employees
Now, all VECCI's applications are accessed via SharePoint, as are all document servers. All general office and HR forms, document libraries with manuals and guides for staff are accessed via the intranet. The intranet also features departmental sites incorporating knowledge bases, contacts including employee photos and useful links; an employee homepage featuring RSS feeds of headlines from The Age, job advertisements from Seek for vacancies within VECCI, weather and more; and internal communications announcements such as policy changes and employee benefits. According to Howarth, “Part of the goal is to provide a single place for knowledge workers to find all information.”
Integrated Document Management
As an example of the departmental applications, a document management solution for VECCI's legal practice integrates with Microsoft CRM, creating a central secured repository for documents and allowing staff to search and drill down by client or by legal matter, with all information accessible both in CRM and SharePoint.
Workflow Management
Workflow management is also a key element. VECCI uses SharePoint for task tracking, such as monitoring who is responsible for responding to common email addresses, allowing a more proactive management of responses. Another example is interaction between HR and IT, with IT being automatically advised of new hires to set up employees on systems, and similarly to remove employees' details when they cease to work with VECCI and automatically redirect emails if appropriate. Employee leave applications are also lodged in SharePoint, generating an email to an employer's manager for approval, then automatically notifying payroll. As an additional step, reminders are issued to managers about upcoming team members leave dates. Furthermore, a custom timesheet application links to payroll and HR, and issues automatic reminders to staff if time is missing.
Collaboration
Fostering collaboration is another focus area, with VECCI creating online discussion groups and workspaces for committees. For example an IT steering committee managed by Howarth uses SharePoint to issue meeting agenda and documents, then participants attend the meeting having analysed the information and making a productive contribution, rather than coming to listen to information.
Reporting Centre
VECCI employees can also access reports via Microsoft Reporting Services, either on request or by subscribing to regular reports, and access the data warehouse and analytic reports.
Integrated Communication
Finally, integration between SharePoint, Outlook and VECCI's phone system allows the management of speed dials and phone settings can be synchronised to calendar to automate voicemail messages. As an example of this, public holidays are automatically added to VECCI team members Outlook calendars and voicemail is set accordingly.
Benefits
“A key benefit for VECCI is the ease with which staff can now collaborate, but in their own time. “In today's business world people need to work more efficiently with less time. SharePoint allows staff to collaborate when they have the time, through the use of tools like discussion boards and workspaces.”
Howarth also believes SharePoint enables VECCI to manage documents more effectively and ensure version control, which is an important consideration when it comes to meeting compliance and governance requirements.
“Essentially, we have created a one-stop shop for all employees; a single place where it is easy to find everything.
Professional Advantage was significant in pulling this all together and assisting us to understand the technology opportunities. They helped us to develop a solution for today, but more importantly, one that has scope for even more business improvements, workflow and integration”, said Howarth.
The Future
VECCI is now in the process of reviewing its website with a view to upgrading. It intends to follow a similar model to its intranet.
Howarth also believes that VECCI's use of SharePoint will continue to grow as more employees realise the full potential of the system. “The development of committee sites for online collaboration is also about to take off with a few groups already operating through SharePoint. The use of SharePoint won't stop now and we expect the haystack to get bigger, but still be well-ordered!” concluded Howarth.