Eniro: Product Development and Project Management Solution

Accenture, Eniro and Microsoft created a solution to facilitate new product development and project management across Eniro's multiple businesses located in 19 countries. The team built the solutions on a beta version of Microsoft Office System 2003 (Office 2003) and rapidly developed, piloted and deployed it by leveraging out-of-the-box capabilities of Microsoft software, all as part of its Office 2003 Rapid Adoption program.

For anyone wanting to find "something or someone" in Northern Europe, Eniro can help. A leading directional media and search-related company, Eniro operates in 19 countries and through multiple channels—printed directories, the Internet, telephone and mobile applications. Eniro's products help purchasers find suppliers.

In 2002 the company published 700 directories with a circulation of 28 million, while more than 600 million searches were conducted via its websites. Eniro has 5,000 employees and boasted 2002 revenues of $520 million.

With rapid growth through acquisitions of both online and offline companies, Eniro recognized a need to consolidate across its businesses. As part of the consolidation strategy, Eniro sought to deploy a consistent new product development and project management solution to enable collaboration across the organization. Ideally, the solution would increase speed to market for new products, reduce manual reporting, improve scheduling and ultimately help drive the company's consolidation agenda.

Eniro had been using a project management and collaboration tool provided by an application service provider (ASP). In addition to security concerns, the tool did not allow for custom functions pertinent to Eniro's business and standard templates were being modified by project managers. There was a proliferation of unofficial forms. Eniro wanted to make productivity and quality improvements—do more with less—by optimizing its existing software investments to their fullest potential. Additionally, as the solution would eventually be rolled out to Eniro's operating entities in 19 countries, it needed to be scalable, highly secure and help reduce total cost of ownership. Thanks to close collaboration between Accenture and Eniro personnel and support from Microsoft, a program management solution was developed and piloted for Eniro, helping the company achieve the following results:

Customer relationship management

• More effective product development.
  
  
• Faster reaction time to new customer needs and market trends.
  
  
• Greater ability to win new customers and retain current customers.
  
  
• Enhanced local product offerings as a result of better coordination between local teams and Central Information.

Employee productivity

• Better collaboration across the organization: division-to- division and country-to-country.
  
  
• Improved decision-making ability based on accurate data.
  
  
• Enhanced project prioritization.
  
  
• Improved information sharing, increased information security, simplified user administration.

Cost to serve

• Reduced product development cycle time and cost.
  
  
• Increased reuse and sharing.
  
  
• Faster new product launches.

"We need to have an effective, secure and transparent project management and collaboration solution that allowed us to manage a growing pipeline of business development projects requiring IT support. As with the strategy and operations work it has completed for Eniro, Accenture is living up to our high expectations in the technology arena as well."—Eniro's CIO Dag Wigum.

Accenture learned of Eniro's desire to deploy a new product development and project management solution approximately a year after beginning business operations and strategy work with the company. Thanks to its privileged, strategic alliance relationship with Microsoft, which has resulted in over 700 successful joint client projects since its inception in 2000, Accenture was able to make Eniro a compelling offer. Accenture proposed architecting a solution for Eniro built on several Microsoft Office products and delivering the work at minimal cost to Eniro—all as part of a Microsoft Office System 2003 Rapid Adoption program Accenture was running.

Coupled with the attractiveness of the Rapid Adoption Program was the value Eniro could achieve by leveraging its existing agreement with Microsoft. Additionally, Office System provides a familiar user interface and could be integrated into Eniro's existing Desktop platform.

With all of this in mind, Accenture immediately began to explore how it could incorporate the out-of-the-box functionality of Microsoft products into this new desktop solution for Eniro:

• Microsoft Office 2003 (Beta 2)
  
  
• Microsoft Windows .NET Server 2003 (Enterprise Edition Beta)
  
  
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (Beta 2)
  
  
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000

First, Accenture implemented Microsoft's SharePoint portal server 2003 and developed customized Web Parts for SharePoint Portal Server to replace Eniro's existing project management solution.

SharePoint stores and organizes all project documentation and is accessible from any location independently of the local systems in use. With SharePoint, Eniro personnel are now equipped with a standard workspace—called a project dashboard—where project-specific information such as task lists, schedules, calendars and contact lists can be stored and even automatically updated. The individual project status data can be rolled up into automatically-generated project reports, allowing all business development personnel to track projects. SharePoint Portal Server is one of the products available within Office System.

Second, the Accenture team, working alongside members of Eniro's b2i Online Nordic (business to individual) unit integrated the SharePoint Portal Server with the Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server. This integration allows for project and meeting scheduling including widespread visibility for individuals into personal and project calendars at the same time.

Additionally, Accenture developed customized status reporting templates using managed code behind Microsoft Office 2003 documents and .NET technologies. These solutions tie business logic and custom actions to the contents of a Microsoft Office Word 2003 or Microsoft Office Excel 2003 document. This represents the first time these types of templates were created on .NET. Use of the templates is expected to reduce the time it takes to prepare consolidated status reports by 100 percent, and help Eniro achieve a 40 percent increase in use of standard templates.

A joint team of Accenture and Eniro technologists and specialists completed the work in weeks and the solution was piloted among 50 users from Eniro's b2i Online Nordic and Central IT units.

Technology Used:
Microsoft Office 2003 (Beta 2)
Microsoft Windows .NET Server 2003 (Enterprise Edition Beta)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (Beta 2)
Microsoft SQL Server 2000