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Situation
Eastman Chemical Company makes chemicals, fibers, and plastics that other companies use as key ingredients for everyday productsincluding food packaging, automobile paint, clothing fabrics, beverages, cosmetics, and more. Eastman is headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, where about 7,500 of its 10,000-plus employees work and most manufacturing occurs. Eastman also has 16 other manufacturing plants (including joint ventures) in nine countries and multiple sales offices worldwide. Eastman is a Fortune 500 company with 2010 revenues of U.S.$5.8 billion.
After developing our requirements, it took two people just four months to create AIM on SharePoint Server. This eliminated the $350,000 expense of buying a commercial product and customizing it.
Ed Montgomery
The industry term for the process of wisely caring for capital assets is asset information management. For a capital asset to perform optimally and provide maximum return on investment, companies need to have complete, accurate, and immediately available asset information. Employees dealing with those assets need to be able to answer questions such as: Who made this asset? How old is it? What is its role? Do we have spare parts on hand? What maintenance work is pending? What parts are under warranty? How do I install it? How do I operate it? Poor asset management results in equipment downtime, operating delays, higher maintenance costs, shorter equipment life, and environmental and safety incidents.
Solution
While employees were struggling with this document management software, Eastman was busy rolling out Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its companywide intranet software and for team collaboration sites across the company. Employees found Office SharePoint Server 2007 so easy to use and so helpful in streamlining business processes that between 2007 and 2009 they created approximately 7,000 SharePoint sites used by nearly all 10,000 employees. By 2010, Eastman had approximately 10 terabytes of information on SharePoint sites. With the gradual and grass-roots shift to Office SharePoint Server 2007, it became increasingly onerous for employees to move between it and the document management program. We had long wanted to get rid of our document management system and standardize on Office SharePoint Server as our companywide content management platform, says Ed Montgomery, Project Manager in the Information Technology Project Office at Eastman Chemical Company. The effort intensified when the national economic recession settled in, around 2008, and cash became scarce. We no longer had the luxury of
maintaining multiple document repository tools providing overlapping capability. In January 2009, Eastman embarked on a serious effort to shut down the older program. Even though Office SharePoint Server was easier to use than the previous program, Eastman faced a great deal of customization work to replicate the asset management functionality in that program. However, good news came in early 2010 when Eastman found out about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the successor to Office SharePoint Server 2007. Many of the capabilities that we would have to create from scratch in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to replace our previous asset management application were present out-of-the-box in SharePoint Server 2010, says Jim McGuire, Supervisor in the Global Collaboration and Portal Architecture Group at Eastman Chemical Company.
Development Efficiencies
In August 2010, Eastman deployed SharePoint Server 2010, and two Eastman developers began the work of recreating the asset management application in SharePoint Server 2010. By December 2010, they were doneafter just two months of planning and two months of development work. Eastman calls the new application AIM (short for asset information management). We did far more than just move documents from point A to point B and replicate previous functionality in SharePoint Server; we used the features in SharePoint Server to change our business processes to help employees be much more efficient, says Rebecca Dietrich, one Many of the of the two developers and a Systems Analyst in the Global Collaboration and Portal Architecture Group at Eastman Chemical capabilities that we Company.
would have to create from scratch in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to replace our previous asset management application were present out-of-thebox in SharePoint Server 2010.
Jim McGuire
In addition to the out-of-the-box features in SharePoint Server 2010, Dietrich and her colleague used Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, an HTML editor and web design program for creating and modifying SharePoint sites, and the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system. The enhanced integration between SharePoint Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 saved me a lot of work, says Kevin Tinn, the other developer and also a Systems Analyst in the Global Collaboration and Portal Architecture Group at Eastman Chemical Company. When you create a SharePoint project in Visual Studio 2010, it creates the deployment package for you, which automates a good bit of the development process. Developers are free to focus on being more innovative.
Eastman made heavy use of content types in SharePoint Server 2010. With content types, employees can specify the content fields, policies, workflows, and other rules for a specific kind of content, such as a design document. Once defined, content types can be extended to other documents and reused across SharePoint sites. Each capital project has its own SharePoint site, and every document in that site can be assigned common metadata, Tinn says. Employees can also upload multiple documents in one step. These are efficiencies that save time and also ensure metadata accuracy and consistency and easier document search.
Supervisor, Global Collaboration and Portal Architecture Group, Eastman Chemical Company
Eastman also used the SharePoint Server concept of document sets, a group of documents that support a single project and share the same metadata. The entire document set can be versioned as a whole and downloaded as a compressed zip file with all the contents. People can also initiate a workflow on the entire set instead of individual workflows for each document. We used document sets to create a new content type called a transmittal, which we use to move project documents from one stage to another with automated efficiencies, Dietrich says.
Eastman is evaluating Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint for more sophisticated and broader search results. Ultimately, well use FAST Search Server to deliver not only content but also people and data, says Tinn. For example, if someone enters the word safety we want them to see safety-related documents, our division safety coordinators, safety statistics, and so forth. Eastman runs the AIM application on five virtual machinestwo web servers, one application server, one database server, and one index server.
We estimate that we are seeing an annual cost avoidance of $4.3 million by managing our asset more effectively, eliminating downtime, and reducing maintenance costs.
Ed Montgomery
Benefits
By migrating its asset management application to SharePoint Server 2010, Eastman Chemical Company was able to avoid spending $350,000 on a commercial replacement. More importantly, Eastman is able to manage capital assets more efficiently, avoiding an estimated $4.3 million annually in downtime and maintenance costs. The company also estimates speeding up capital project cycles significantly and expects employee productivity gains.
Montgomery says. Audits occur on a frequent basis because were a chemicals manufacturer, so this is an important efficiency gain in the area of regulatory compliance.