Situation
DTEK is a privately owned, vertically integrated energy company in Ukraine. It extracts coal from the ground, converts it to electricity, and distributes that electricity to millions of customers in Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, Kiev, and surrounding regions. DTEK is based in Kiev and Donetsk and employs about 63,000 people: 58,000 field workers and 5,000 information workers. For the last five years, DTEK has been growing rapidly, primarily through acquisition. By 2010, it had acquired more than 20 companies, each of which brought its own intranet, document stores, company directory, and information management culture. Employees struggled to locate and make sense of approximately 7 terabytes of information scattered across dozens of file-share servers and individual company intranets. “Once an acquisition becomes a division of DTEK, employees there need to exchange information and have conversations with other divisions,” says Sergey Detyuk, Chief Information Officer of DTEK. “The inability to do this was preventing our business from moving as quickly as we wanted.”
Employees primarily stored documents in file-share servers, but these were neither easy to search nor available outside divisions. They were also not secure enough to please management. Employees sent flurries of email messages to colleagues to locate documents; if a document was finally located, it was dispatched as an email attachment.
In addition to slowing down information access and decisions, the decentralized information structure was expensive. DTEK had dozens of file-share servers across the company that it had to refresh every three to five years. Additionally, DTEK was spending about U.S.$35,000 annually on outside consultants that conducted surveys of DTEK employees.
DTEK has to comply with environmental and financial regulations, but gathering the needed data became increasingly difficult as the company grew. “It took weeks for our compliance team to track down data from all the various divisions, which made it difficult for us to submit compliance reports on time,” says Sergey Bondarenko, Deputy Chief Information Officer at DTEK.
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In early 2010, the DTEK Information Management Systems group began considering its options for building a single corporate portal. It evaluated leading commercial portal solutions, including one from SAP, but it found that most were exceedingly expensive and required extensive customization work to meet DTEK needs. Some groups within DTEK used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for information sharing and reporting, so the company looked at that program’s successor, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. “We had already standardized on Microsoft software throughout much of our data center, so we liked the idea of using SharePoint Server 2010,” Detyuk says. ”Another reason to go with SharePoint Server was its deep integration with Microsoft products and services that we had already deployed, which would lead to a more painless deployment and integration of SharePoint Server into our environment.”
Close Work Between IT and Business Teams
With the selection decision made, DTEK spent 18 months creating its new corporate portal and migrating information to it from company file servers and other sources. The IT team used Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 to design individual SharePoint pages and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional to develop custom business processes in SharePoint Server. “Mostly we used built-in SharePoint Server workflows because we did not want a lot of customization,” Bondarenko says. “Working with SharePoint Server was very easy for our Microsoft-trained development team.” To ensure that the portal matched the needs of the business, the IT team worked closely with business teams to determine the portal architecture and needed sites, document libraries, and workspaces. DTEK defines workspaces as team sites used by specific business groups. Once the portal structure was defined and authorizations assigned, individual business teams migrated their own documents to the portal. This avoided migrating outdated or unnecessary documents.
The DTEK IT staff offered a variety of classroom and online training options to teach employees how to use the new portal, workspaces, and workflows. The staff offered face-to-face training for executives and business group administrators who support other employees. For all other information workers, it provided extensive online resources through the portal: video-based lessons, presentations, articles, and frequently asked questions.
The portal solution runs in a virtualized infrastructure of five virtual machines running on a six-node Hyper-V cluster. On the cluster are two web servers, two application servers, and one search/index server. A separate two-node database cluster runs Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. All servers run the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system.
Companywide Portal
In December 2010, DTEK launched its new portal, which serves as both a company intranet and a central place for business groups to store and share documents and perform common business processes. The intranet portion of the portal provides general company news, an electronic corporate magazine, policies and procedures, general services such as business card ordering, and an employee directory. Employees can also find personalized reports on their earnings, taxes, benefits, and mobile phone usage. Completing expense reports, ordering business cards, and making travel plans are all handled by SharePoint workflows. The employee surveys that used to be performed by expensive third-party firms are now handled on the intranet. The intranet contains a document and people search box where employees can search for documents and colleagues by entering a search term such as “Donetsk market.” The built-in search capability in SharePoint Server goes through several terabytes of documents to locate all search results, both documents and people, related to the energy market in Donetsk. DTEK took advantage of the SharePoint Server multilingual interface to present the portal interface and search functionality in both Russian and English.
DTEK is working to link SAP and other business software, such as human resources applications, to the portal so that employees have centralized access to needed applications.
Team Workspaces and Workflows
The portal contains access to workspaces, or mini-portals, that serve the needs of specific DTEK divisions and business units. In their workspaces, teams store documents used by team members every day and also share calendars, lists, and discussions. Financial specialists created a workspace for storing and sharing tax, earnings, and expense reports. Teams acquiring new companies or opening new mines can share project plans and drawings on workspaces. Workspace owners can define access rules and selectively grant access to employees outside their team or division. Divisions and business units have also created workflows in their workspaces for automating routine business processes. For example, one DTEK Supervisory Board workflow polls member calendars for availability and schedules meetings. Another workflow enables board members to check off milestones on various tasks and creates performance dashboards so all board members can quickly see the status of key projects. The board also votes through a SharePoint workflow that sends email reminders and tabulates votes.
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By creating a single company portal using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, DTEK has given its 5,000 information workers instant, targeted access to needed documents and expertise, which helps them make decisions and execute business faster. DTEK has also reduced expenses by eliminating file servers, and has accelerated its compliance reporting process.
Faster Access to Needed Resources
With a single place to go to locate needed documents, DTEK employees can more easily and quickly find what they need. “Information sharing across the whole company and automated workflows have been crucial enablers supporting our dynamic growth,” Detyuk says. “Plus, we have had very positive feedback from our employees. Information is more accessible and more structured so that they can find documents more easily. There is no longer a need to send documents through email.” As an example, the legal department saves about 120 hours each month by exchanging documents electronically rather than manually with paper.
Savings of $93,000
By centralizing all document storage in its new portal, DTEK has been able to eliminate about six file servers across the company to date, a savings of about $58,000, with more savings anticipated. DTEK also eliminated the $35,000 annually that it paid to the third-party survey firms.
It also saved on development costs. “We did not do an exact comparison, but I believe that using other commercial portal products would have cost ten times more than SharePoint cost, thanks to the deep integration with other Microsoft software that we have already deployed,” Detyuk says.
Faster Regulatory Compliance
DTEK has been able to make compliance reporting more convenient and faster, both for end users and the Compliance Management Department by replacing paper forms and manual compliance management procedures with automated workflows in SharePoint Server 2010.
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Sharepoint-Designer-2010/DTEK/Ukraine-Energy-Firm-Puts-Documents-and-Workflows-in-Single-Portal-for-Faster-Access/4000010797
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