"Collaboration is a great feature. It used to take us 7 days to build each proposal, but with Office 2010 we can turn them around in only 3 days!"

Andrea Xavier, consultant director, BHS

A Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Brazilian IT service provider Belo Horizonte Sistemas (BHS) specializes in Microsoft Office Project Server, SharePoint® Server, and Learning Solutions. The company’s services are always in demand.

With an influx of new business opportunities, it had become a struggle for BHS to get proposals off in a timely manner. On the project side, the company also noticed that the development process for customer training manuals was taking much longer, and with the business growth, tracking and analyzing projects had become challenging as well.

BHS needed to find a way to streamline the proposal process, expedite the development of training manuals, and provide better insight into projects as they progressed. By deploying Microsoft Office 2010, BHS was able to act more quickly on opportunities, deliver training materials faster, and better track the progress of IT projects.

SituationConsultants on the road who needed to contribute to the proposal process were finding it difficult to access and edit critical documents. According to Andrea Xavier, consultant director at BHS, the pressure was significant. “When multiple consultants from different teams needed to contribute to a proposal, it could take up to 7 business days to finalize a document,” he says. “That put us at risk of losing new opportunities to more agile organizations.”

When developing training manuals for customers in PowerPoint, the process of embedding and editing graphics was cumbersome and time-consuming, eating up 10% of the allotted production time. BHS had to use third-party software and a 3-step process to insert images into the slides, and this

drove the production time for each manual to a full 40 hours.

Tracking projects had also become difficult as the business grew. Graphic representations of staffing, timelines, and budgets in spreadsheets were not easy to build and analyze. This left project managers without the most accurate picture of project status, making it a struggle to determine the best allocation of resources to keep project moving and on target.

BHS knew it needed to find a way to reduce the multiple steps and time required to embed graphics into user training manuals for customers, provide an easier way for project managers to display and analyze mission-critical data related to ongoing projects, and enhance collaboration between consultants working on new-business proposals—regardless of their location. The company found a solution in Microsoft Office 2010.

SolutionMicrosoft Office 2010 enables users to work more efficiently across teams and stay connected to important files from anywhere. It also allows users to more quickly and easily develop polished documentation without expensive third-party design assistance, and helps generate business insights with ease and confidence.

Enhanced CollaborationSometimes BHS consultants need to collaborate on proposals and manuals with consultants from multiple teams. The co-authoring* experience with the new Microsoft Word, PowerPoint®, and

Customer: Belo Horizonte Sistemas

Web Site: www.bhs.com.br

Size: 140 employees

Country or Region: Brazil

Industry: IT Services

ProfileA Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Brazilian IT service provider BHS specializes in Microsoft Office Project Server, SharePoint Server, and Learning Solutions.

Software and Services Co-authoring Excel 2010 OneNote 2010 Photo and Video Editing PowerPoint 2010 Slicers Sparklines Word 2010

For more information about Microsoft Office, go to:www.office.com

Microsoft Office 2010Customer Solution Case Study

BHS Increases Productivity, Responding to RFPs 60% Faster with Microsoft® Office 2010

OneNote® enables multiple users to work on a file simultaneously from different locations.

“Collaboration is a great feature,” says Xavier. “It used to take us 7 days to build each proposal, but with Office 2010 we can turn them around in only 3 days!”

The collaboration functionality also helps expedite processes when BHS is validating requirements for proposals with remote customers. Using co-authoring, the company lowers the downtime incurred by sending emails back and forth by 50%, and reduces travel to and from customer locations by 25%.

Easier Graphics, FasterIn the past, BHS consultants had to perform multiple steps to insert images into user manuals. They had to select and copy images into Microsoft Paint, save them to their hard drives as a .jpg file, and then insert them into slides.

With PowerPoint 2010, BHS users can quickly and easily embed graphics into manuals with a single step. Before the upgrade, manual development used to take 40 hours, but with PowerPoint 2010, there is no need to manipulate graphics before inserting, and this has cut manual production time by 50%.

“We are not professional designers, and the multiple steps previously required to get images into manuals made the process slow and painful,” confirms Xavier. “Now we can drop any graphic into a manual in just seconds!”

Better Data AnalysisThe new data analysis and visualization features in Microsoft Excel® 2010 enable BHS project managers to easily track and highlight important data trends, such as the amount and type of hours being used on specific projects. This helps them to make smarter decisions on staffing and resources for projects, timelines, and budgets.

The new Sparklines feature delivers a clear and compact visual representation of data with small charts in a cell. The new Slicers feature lets users filter and

segment PivotTable® data in multiple layers so BHS project managers can spend more time analyzing and less time formatting.

Say Xavier, “I feel that we’re able to make smarter business decisions now that we have a more concise view of project data with the Excel PivotTables.”

Continued GrowthXavier and his team are happy to see how their Office upgrade has contributed directly to the company’s bottom line. “The advances delivered by Office 2010 have taken away the obstacles that were slowing us down,” he states. “Today we are more productive than ever, and better positioned to continue to grow our business.”

* Co-authoring capabilities require either

Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation Services or a

free Windows Live account.

© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Backstage, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published 11/2009