SCC Regains $75,000 in Billable Hours Annually with Microsoft Office 2010 Customer Solution Case Study

June 2010

In 1992, Erik Thorsell started Success Computer Consulting (SCC) in a spare bedroom of his home. Since then, SCC has expanded into a thriving company comprised of 23 dedicated employees who serve 250 small to medium-sized businesses out of the company's Minneapolis office. Despite its rapid growth, the company's core focus remains the same: Delivering high-quality IT solutions with a friendly, personalized approach.

Communication is central to SCC's success, and Thorsell is always on the lookout for ways to enhance collaboration so employees can cultivate stronger client relationships and deploy IT solutions in less time.

By deploying Microsoft Office 2010, SCC was able to find more efficient, effective ways for its employees to work together and connect with their clients-whether in the office or on the road, resulting in improved performance and increased client satisfaction.


Business Needs

The company receives hundreds of thousands of emails annually, and employees were finding it difficult to organize and track down related messages quickly and easily. Scheduling appointments with clients was also difficult, as employees had to email their availability back and forth before pinning down a time.

In addition, each employee had his or her own way of filing and storing data, so retrieving team notes and related client-based information required the tedious process of rifling through disparate files and folders. And without a way to access files remotely, SCC's technicians had to search through their own laptops for project-related information, which delayed IT problem resolution.

SCC, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, needed to find a way to improve email organization, facilitate increased collaboration, and help its technicians find solutions faster while working remotely.


Solution SCC found its solution in Microsoft Office 2010. By providing more efficient ways to manage and organize communications, work collaboratively on client projects to complete them faster, and access mission-critical information while on-the-go, Office 2010 enabled SCC to streamline operations, work together in new ways, and deploy its leading IT solutions to its clients in less time.

According to Thorsell, the combination of speed and flexibility provided by Office 2010 has given SCC a greater competitive edge. "Office 2010 gives us more time, which translates into hundreds of billable hours we can add to our business," he says. "More importantly, we can continue creating the innovative solutions our clients rely on."


Improving Communication With Conversation View in Outlook 2010, each email is automatically sorted and condensed by subject line, eliminating the need to manually organize emails, and allowing users to quickly locate related messages.

"I used to spend hours hunting down project-related emails," says Jamie Wolbeck, service manager of SCC. "Conversation View instantly groups client emails by ticket number, so I can find everything I need with just a few clicks."

By integrating Outlook 2010 with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, users can use the Schedule View feature to access multiple employee calendars and view them side-by side. Instead of emailing schedules back and forth, SCC employees can spot availability for every team member in just seconds, saving time and frustration.

"Schedule View integrates so seamlessly with Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, I started using it without even knowing it," remarks Wolbeck. "It's definitely made it easier to manage everyone's schedule."

Thorsell points out that combined, the enhanced capabilities of Outlook have saved SCC hundreds of hours annually. "Outlook alone saves every user 5-15 minutes per day," he says. "When you add that up across the organization, that's hundreds of hours. In fact, it's $75,000 in billable hours we can regain every year."


Connecting Ideas, Increasing Flexibility SCC employees have found a new way to share information and create client proposals in less time, thanks to Microsoft OneNote. This application acts as a centralized notebook where users can store, share, and retrieve ideas and project recommendations. "OneNote has transformed the way we work," says Eric Vollbrecht, project engineer of SCC. "We can easily store and access project-related files from one place-and that means we can create proposals and implement solutions faster than ever."

With Web Apps* for OneNote 2010, PowerPoint , Excel and Word, SCC technicians can retrieve project-related information while working remotely at client sites. Essentially, this feature extends users' Office experiences to almost any computer with an Internet connection by allowing users to store documents online and access them while on-the-go. As Chris VanAnda, network engineer of SCC points out, "Web Apps allows us to access everything we need-product and technical information-when working remotely. This saves us an hour per day and makes it easier to help our clients in less time."


Bringing Everything Together to Realize Success

Thorsell is impressed by the time saved and productivity gained by using Office 2010. He notes that the intuitive user interface, including an enhanced Ribbon that's available in all of the applications, will help new users learn and take advantage of these new features straight away.

"The new Ribbon really just brings everything together," he says. "Overall, the investments Microsoft made to improve the user interface have totally paid off. I'd recommend this system in a heartbeat."