Microsoft Chemical Team Blog

This past week, we released Windows Vista adoption case studies for Eastman Chemical and PPG.  The Eastman story focuses on the timing of their refresh cycle and their evaluation of whether to stay on Windows XP or move to Vista.  The Vista decision came from a number of factors, not the least of which is getting better control and limiting administrator privileges to their corporate machines.  As part of their rollout plan, they did a small pilot to their North American IT group of 350 users in October, 2007, and then to the broader global IT group soon after.  After a successful pilot, they began deploying in February, 2008 and expect to be rolled out to most/all of its 10,000 users by August, 2008. 

Eastman is developing some notoriety in fast and efficient deployments.  We have a case study from back in 2006 where they deployed Office 2003 to their enterprise in 5 weeks.  They live the benefits of their standardization, centralization, and consolidation approach - a reflection of our infrastructure optimization model.

While Eastman is upgrading from Windows XP, PPG is upgrading 25,000 desktops from Windows 2000 Professional.  Motivating their upgrade was the decision to deploy Office 2007 to all of its users and to support the latest peripherals their global workforce needs to be successful.  They launched a Desktop of the Future initiative, which included refreshing the access to their standard collaboration tools for Exchange 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, LiveMeeting 2007, and Office Communications Server 2007.  They are 5,000+ seats deployed as of the middle of this year and plan to complete the rollout by mid-2010.

A couple of approaches coming from a couple different perspectives.  I hope it helps you make a good decision for your company on when and how to best deploy Vista.

On behalf of the Microsoft team, congratulations to Mike Jones, President of GTS Services for being named a top performer under 40 by AutoGlass Magazine (PPG press release), and thank you for being a great Microsoft partner.  Mike spun up a new technology business unit in 2002 to connect and automate the auto glass value chain through electronic claims processing and product ordering.  That initiative was wildly successful, and led him to GTS in 2005 where he leads the company.  GTS Services is the leading business software and services provider to the glass industry.  They are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a Dynamics GP integration partner.

Congratulations, Mike!

Coincidentally to my last post, we just released a case study showing how LyondellBasell was able to meet the new air-quality requirements in Southeast, Texas using the VisionMonitor Compliance Intelligence solution written by one of our partners, VisionMonitor Software.

The case study highlights how LyondellBasell implemented new equipment at 8 sites to monitor emissions sources, but did not have a solution for aggregating the data, reporting on it, and having the level of auditing and record-keeping capabilities required by the new regulations.

They were able to go from selection to go-live with VisionMonitor in about 8 months, which exceeded their expectations.  More importantly, it allowed them to have the systems in place to meet the new Southeast Texas regulations.

A lot of what we do on the industry teams is focused on what we call Role-Based Productivity - which is really about extending the reach and richness of business applications to people who are collaborating and making decisions around a work process every day.  Bruce Pollard, Business Solutions Lead for Lyondell says it better than I can say it:

“Microsoft software helps us put data into our people’s hands to help them make smart decisions faster,” Pollard says. “It makes it easier for our people to use their expertise, and in the environmental area, that’s young expertise. The average age of an environmental engineer is significantly lower than that of our operating engineers. Web-based tools like VMCI are familiar to these people.”

Thank you to Bruce and to LyondellBasell for sharing this story...

The environment is a key priority for the chemical industry, and I get a lot of interest and questions about ways Microsoft and our partners are using software and technology to help customers either lessen their impact on the environment - or accelerate innovations that improve the world and environment around us.  This is certainly a cross-industry and cross-sector issue.  We recently launched a new environmental website where we are pulling together all of our environmental-related information.  From how we do business at Microsoft, to how customers are leveraging our software and our partners to help achieve their own environmental goals.  I previously blogged about the OSISoft case study featured on the site.

One area of particular interest to technology infrastructure roles is the power savings delivered by Vista and Windows Server 2008.  You can get to all the information, white papers and studies on this topic through the environmental website.

Take a look and let me know what you think...as I find interesting case studies from other verticals, I will even post about those that could be relevant to my chemical customers.

This scenario comes up quite a bit in the chemical industry - IT management of remote offices where the number of people in the office is low.  We recently released a case study with LaFarge North America on how they approached this challenge using Windows Server 2008.  LaFarge NA is a leading construction materials supplier in the US and Canada, and they have 1,000 locations - 600 of them with less than 10 people.

They took an interesting approach to network security in the branch offices by using freed-up servers from their data center consolidation, and deploying server-core and a read-only domain controller for the branch offices.  The server core can run on these "old" (3-years old) servers deployed out to the branches.  This creativity is going to save them $400K over 3-years.  Not too shabby.

If you have a similar scenario in your environment - take a look at the case study.

We released the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint to our CodePlex site this week.  I've seen a growing interest in implementing social media scenarios internally for chemical companies to encourage peer-sharing of best practices.  This project was born out of an internal intiative around the same concept - a way to allow people within the company to share information in a much richer way than in the past.  It runs on top of Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007.

For those not familiar with projects we deliver on CodePlex, this Podcasting Kit is available free (you need to own SharePoint and all the dependent technology, of course), delivered with source code, and is supported by the community.  Think of it as an accelerator to jump start your social media scenarios whether they are around eLearning.

There are many scenarios where this approach could have value - engineering best practices (here's how to fix 'x'), R&D sharing, vendor collaboration, general business scenarios.

Take a look at the site for full details.  The team posted a slide-deck, demo, FAQ, history of the project, roadmap - basically all the information you need to know to get started.

Summer is in full-force in North Carolina with a forecast of mid-to-upper 90s over the next few days.  Of course, I am in Boston right now with a customer at our Boston MTC, and it is only 58 degrees here.  Let the summer season begin!

We released a new case study last month documenting Wet & Forget's choice of using Microsoft Great Plains for their ERP solution to support their growing business.  They used partner Olympic Software in the implementation.

I love the quote from Director, Leigh Jenden who said "When making a decision like this for your business, you need to feel the safety factor. With Microsoft Great Plains and Olympic Software, we felt it was a safe decision."

On a side note, I provided a link to their website, which includes producs such as Ants in Ya Pants and Miss Muffet's Revenge.  If you live in New Zealand, you probably know this company, but if you don't, check out their website.  Really clever branding...

Thank you to Wet & Forget for sharing their story....

We issued a press release today about our innovation management initiative.  I have blogged about this a few times in the past in one form or another.  Our innovation management initiative is a cross-industry initiative and is really aimed at how our customers can use the Microsoft platform to accelerate the innovation process, and ultimately produce better returns.  Today was the formal launch of the initiative as a follow on to our presence at last week's Front End of Innovation conference in Boston.

For many of my chemical customers, this is a relevant solution area.  Some customers will look at it strictly as an R&D scenario, while others will look at it as a manufacturing & engineering scenario.  Those rare few will even look at it as a cross-company scenario, where everyone in the company is a source of innovation and ideas.  The difference is usually one of business strategy, culture and process.  Regardless of your deployment model, the ability to capture ideas, collaborate on them to make them stronger, rate and prioritize them, and then track funded ideas through the pipeline is an important capability of many innovative companies.  We've built our model to extend throughout the organization (and even to partners and customers if you choose) using familiar tools (Office, SharePoint, etc...).

Our primary case study for innovation process management in the chemical industry is Ampacet who used our partner, DataLan, for their implementation.  I have a few other case studies I am trying to lock down, but customers can be understandably hesitant to share any details of their innovation and R&D scenarios.  I appreciate all of you who are willing to do so.

I've just kicked off some work to do a more formal write-up of innovation process management for chemical companies.  That will be posted on our http://www.microsoft.com/chemical site.  I will post to this blog to let you know when I complete the work.  You can take a look and give me feedback.

SAT Corporation has released a nice 15-minute on-demand webinar which provides their point-of-view of how the Oil & Gas and chemical industry can use technology to provide role-based productivity to your mobile maintenance workforce.  They provide a nice overview of the business case for change, and highlight one of their customer success stories with Valero.  Charlie Mohrmann does a really nice job with the webinar.

SAT Corp uses the Microsoft platform - from mobile device development through to the back-end and development platform - to deliver its solution.  If you have 15 minutes...it's worth a look.

I was reading a colleague's blog the other day who was excited to be home after a bunch of travel so that he could get back to blogging.  I find it the opposite - I tend to blog more when I travel than I do when I am home.  As you can tell, I have been home over the last week or so.

Anyway, for those of you attending the upcoming PDMA & IIR Annual Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston next week, come see what we are up to.  There is good chemical representation on the board (Ashland) and speaking (Dow Chemical and Dow Corning), and I suspect many of the chemical companies will be in attendance.  Our GM of Innovation will be speaking on the topic of new ideas for ideation, and we will have a booth hosted by our innovation process management solution leads.  You can get a glimpse of our innovation process management scenario here, but if you are at the conference, you will see some new things we are working on added to the scenario.

Our Innovation Process Management solution is built to allow you to take your structure innovation process and support it with technology through the lifecycle.  The solution is built on top of Office SharePoint Server 2007, and uses our Office Project Portfolio Server and Enterprise Project Management solutions as ideas become funded initiatives and into actual projects.

We just released this case study about ChemSynergy Asia, a distributor of oleochemicals in the Phillipines.  They were rolling up financial and inventory information with its headquarters in Germany by using spreadsheets and other manual mechanisms.  They rolled out Dynamics NAV in 4 weeks using the Microsoft Dynamics SureStep methodology, and reduced reporting time by 89% as well as cut utility and manpower costs by 9%.  Take a look when you get the chance.  It is another great example of a hub and spoke architecture for Dynamics as well as a great example of using the right solution for the right challenge

As a follow up to my earlier blog about xobni.com...today they opened the beta to everyone.  You no longer need an invitation.

It was a great few days at the ChemITC spring meeting on Cyber Security.  Not the least of which was enjoying cuban food and great company on Thursday night in South Beach.  Thanks again to Dow Corning for jointly presenting their journey with us.  It was a great presentation.

A funny thing happened on Thursday.  We all received voice mails from the hotel that we would be in virtual lock-down in the hotel in the evening because of the Mercedes-Benz Miami corporate run.  We made it out in time, and avoided the blocked roads and 20,000+ runners.  Check out the story...they have a good gallery of pictures.

I am currently sitting in a hotel in Orlando getting ready for a ChemWeek CIO roundtable tonight.  There are a number of good topics and some really good participants.  It should be a good evening.