The Salvation Army • Alliance Resource Partners • Gundersen Lutheran • American Enterprise Group Inc.
Cabot • Sonoco • Large Government Agency • Mechanical / Electrical Construction Services

Task Management Software Increases Efficiency for The Salvation Army by Creating a More Concientious Workplace

The Salvation Army, a non-profit organization with operations in over one hundred countries worldwide, recently restructured its approach to task management. The non-profit organization found that it needed new task management software in order to plan and build a business continuity site at the organization’s international headquarters in London.

Though the Salvation Army had previously relied on Microsoft Project Management and MindPlanner for basic management of projects and tasks, this massive, complex undertaking required a tool with more brainstorming functionality that was better integrated with Lotus Notes.

Mark Calleran, head of IT for the Salvation Army, chose DC Task Management, the newest release from Logic Springs Technologies, to meet his organization’s growing project management needs.

Calleran tells how the Salvation Army used DC Task Management to build its business continuity site, from the initial brainstorming stage to the site’s creation. “We’ve run the complete project using DC Task Management,” Calleran explains, “from ordering hardware to relocation and commissioning. This project involved many different people—all sorts of areas involving many teams. At every step in the project, DC Task Management has worked beautifully, it’s done exactly what we wanted it to do.”

The feature Calleran found particularly appealing was DC Task Management’s Brainstorming function. He explains that traditionally, his team used a whiteboard or a Mind Mapping tool whenever they needed to brainstorm about a project—and it would then be someone’s assignment to take that data and import it into Microsoft Project. “The idea to integrate brainstorming as a crucial area in DC Task Management has been a significant asset. The amount of time to move from a thought to an actual event used to be considerable. But now, we have the ability to enter pure text into the brainstorm sheet with DC Task Management, the ability to have the developers walk out of a room with all the planning finished—it really changes the way in which we operate.”

But what is perhaps most surprising was the unexpected bi-product of a shared task management application: conscientious employees.
Calleran notes what he calls “a vast improvement in efficiency” since implementing the DC Task Management solution. Because progress on tasks became visible across the enterprise, users’ productivity and attention to deadlines automatically increased. “Traditionally,” he explains, “Monday morning meant looking through the project report—so developers knew they just had to get their work done by Friday.

Now they realize that everyone is watching everyday. They no longer leave or delay a particular item. Individuals have started to take personal ownership of tasks—which is only possible because of DC Task Management’s relationship with Lotus Notes. We never dreamed that this would be an outcome of the software.”

Deploys Calendaring & Alert Notifications

Abstract
While ARLP’s employees work diligently to take advantage of key market opportunities, they recognize that without a reliable tracking and notification tool unforeseen events could result in significant missed opportunities. In response to this need, they purchased Department Calendar and DC Alerts Notification System to automate the process of alerting marketing personnel of major RFP opportunities. Department Calendar enables the organization to distribute messages to marketing personnel and key stakeholders using the communications vehicle of their choice – pager, cell phone, email, and personal digital assistant.  While Department Calendar and DC Alerts were initially being used to support the marketing department’s activities, they soon were used by other departments.

For ARLP, their need was two-fold: An Easy to Use Group Calendar and A Reliable Tracking and Notification tool. As Richard Armstrong, Senior Systems Analyst at ARLP, describes, “We needed a calendaring system that would allow users in a department to easily share a group calendar. Lotus Notes calendaring was very limited and hard to work with. We found that in various departments, things were falling through the cracks without a group calendar. Our employees were uninformed and important reminders were missed . We were looking for a calendar system that would help various departments keep on track of upcoming events, meetings and project deadlines.”

Challenge
The Marketing department needed a way to stay on top of key RFP dates and to automatically notify constituents quickly and efficiently of deadlines. Notifications should employ pager, blackberry, and email.

“The original requirement came from the Marketing Department. They needed a way to stay on top of key dates. As other departments and locations found out about Department Calendar and all the functionality that it offered, they began requesting their own Department Calendars.” Richard states, “We even use one for our Data Center for scheduling appointments. They really use the Direct Entry feature which provides the ability to create appointments and meetings within the Department Calendar and have them push out to the personal calendars. Thus forcing users to stay on top of events and deadlines. Another popular feature is the time off request system which is heavily used and provides a simple automated time off approval workflow for managers and employees.”

Approach
Department Calendar with DC Alerts:

• Creates, sends and receives alert notifications via pager, blackberry, and email
• Disseminates alerts to recipients according to their personalized communication priorities (i.e. pager first, then cell, then email, etc.)
• Tracks alert notification status and detailed alert statistics, including the notification history for a given recipient on a given alert
• Dramatically reduces the incidence of overlooked meetings, appointments, and To Dos missed due to changes in schedules or lack of accessible and up to date calendaring information
• Is easy to deploy
• Extends the reach of calendaring management to mobile and remote field workers
• Takes advantage of existing mobile wireless investment in order to deliver important calendaring information, thus ensuring that important company events and deadlines are not missed
• Supports multiple mobile devices, including cell phones, PDAs, and pagers from a single application
• Reduces administration cost by allowing users to maintain their own profile information
• Helps move calendaring information throughout the organization more efficiently

Value Created
Alliance Resource Partners finds Department Calendar to be a critical tool for tracking important bid renewal dates translating into thousands of dollars saved! The Calendaring and Alert Notification System enables the organization to immediately send important messages and alerts of deadlines to the marketing group throughout the country.

“Department Calendar has more than met our expectations. The amount of features this product offers, the well laid-out design coupled with the easy installation has sold us on this product”, says Richard. “It has saved us from not allowing important bid renewal dates from expiring potentially losing customers to our competitors. It has become a critical tool that notifies us of important filing dates, which if missed, would mean thousands of dollars in fines.”

Using Department Calendar and DC Alerts provides a variety of benefits

• Enables distribution of event status updates
• Facilitates verification of information receipt by key personnel
• Improves overall coordination of communication and action
• Improves speed in which staff in the field receive alert notifications

Alliance Resource Partners, L.P. (ARLP) is a diversified producer and marketer of coal to major United States utilities and industrial users. ARLP's predecessor companies began mining operations in 1971 and has since grown to become the sixth-largest coal producer in the eastern United States.

Wanted: Resource Scheduling with Functionality & Flexibility
Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center, one of the nation’s largest complete healthcare networks, found that Lotus Notes Resource Scheduling could not meet their resource scheduling need. According to Lance Jurgensen, Systems Analyst/ Programmer, “We had a specific need to schedule and track our conference room reservations. Our need was fivefold and required the following items:

1. Windows based application
2. Allow all scheduled conference rooms to be seen in one view
3. The ability to print conference room information
4. The ability to view conference room schedule via the Intranet
5. The ability to easily view a person/group’s scheduled conference room

They tried using Lotus Notes Resource Scheduling as Lance describes, “We had the rooms setup as resources and booking individual appointments was easy. But we quickly found that with R5 Resource Scheduling, you could not change individual field information in a booking. In order to make a change, you must delete the entry and recreate it. This was time-consuming and prone to errors and we quickly abandoned this approach.” Thus their search began for a solution to meet their need.

Found: Department Calendar, a Great Resource Scheduling Tool
Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center found that Department Calendar provided the resource scheduling functionality that they required plus additional features that were a bonus for them. Lance describes the benefits realized, “With Department Calendar, we were able to setup our conference rooms as 'People' in our address book and link their calendars into Department Calendar enabling all scheduling to be done from a single access point. Our conference room schedules can now be easily viewed and printed from Department Calendar. Meetings are also easily edited, when needed. Because Department Calendar is also web enabled, we were able to develop an Intranet web page where users could view and print their meeting and resource schedules.”

And as a bonus, Department Calendar provides an array of other robust features such as Time Off Scheduling and Tracking that provides a quick and easy way to track and process vacation requests. Lance describes Department Calendar’s popularity among his users, “After our initial roll-out to the departments requesting the resource scheduling functionality, additional departments became interested in the application and now Department Calendar has spread throughout our organization with more and more groups requesting their own department calendars. It’s a great tool- easy to deploy, straight forward to use, and it meets our needs. Department Calendar is a great value!”

Department Calendar Improves Cabot's Global Team Communication

The Cabot Corporation, founded over 100 years ago, is a global specialty chemicals, materials and energy company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Cabot has established itself as a world leader in their field with annual sales at almost $2 billion and 39 operating plants in 23 countries. To stay competitive and continue to provide their customers with the highest quality and value, Cabot Corporation recognizes the need to expand its use of core technologies. Department Calendar is one such technology that Cabot Corporation has deployed to improve communication and organization within their global corporation.

Department Calendar Meets Cabot's Two-Fold Need
According to Marian Cole, Director of IT Infrastructure at Cabot Corporation, "We had a need that was two-fold. First, was the need for a group calendaring product that would allow our global teams to share calendars under a constrained bandwidth." Because Cabot Corporation is organized into global teams consisting of small groups of people located all over the world, accurate communication of information is vital. "Our teams have a strong need to share schedules, and we prefer the use of replication rather than user query. Secondly, we needed a way to develop site calendars for specific activities at Cabot, such as vacation calendars and visitor calendars, which include additional plant information needed for special runs and experiments scheduled for particular units. Department Calendar has met these needs and more, without our having to spend the time and money on an internal solution", adds Marian.

Department Calendar Provides Critical Detailed Calendaring Information
Department Calendar is a group calendaring add-on to Lotus Notes Calendaring and Scheduling. This unique application pulls participants' designated calendaring/scheduling information from their personal calendars into a group calendar format that can display the user's appointments, events, meetings, anniversaries and tasks. Users can participate in multiple group calendars and share vital scheduling information with specific departments that need it. With Department Calendar, the global teams at Cabot Corporation can quickly review their team calendars to stay informed and connected through the use of replication. "This gives our teams a much better idea of who is doing what and when, making the scheduling of large meetings much easier. Department Calendar provides much more detail than the traditional freetime lookup. This detailed information is critical to us.", says Marian.

Department Calendar: True Shared Calendaring At A Reasonable Price
Department Calendar also provides a quick and easy way of creating and managing group calendars. "One of the features I am most impressed with is the Central Administrative Database which allows me to set-up group calendars and make changes to them in a matter of minutes", remarks Marian Cole. Department Calendar also provides the flexibility of designating the participants, types of entries included, as well as the server it will reside on. Due to the positive user feedback and initial roll-out success of Department Calendar, the Cabot Corporation has expanded its use from one server with fifteen users, to 22 servers with approximately 250 users worldwide. Marian Cole sums up her remarks by saying, "We have found that the business need for shared calendaring is real -- Department Calendar has provided the solution to our needs at a reasonable price."

Department Calendar provides critical collaboration and communication for their Emergency Management/ Disaster Recovery Group
American Enterprise Group Inc. is a leader in the individual health and life insurance industry. American Enterprise Group Inc. offers a variety of major medical, Medicare supplement, life, annuity and critical care/cancer care products. With more than 600 home office associates and more than 15,000 career sales representatives, managing general agents, and personal producing agents, good communication and sharing of information is a must. The Emergency Management/Disaster Recovery group had a critical need to have a central location for everyone’s calendars and schedules.

Critical Need: Easy Access to Team Schedules
According to Keith Ryan, Notes Administrator at American Enterprise Group Inc., “We had no system in place that would allow easy access to team’s schedules without going multiple places to find the information. Our Emergency Management group required the ability to quickly schedule and track their team’s activities so that they could provide the best service to their customers.” With Department Calendar’s ability to display the schedules of a variety of team members on the same calendar, as well as, provide an easy way to schedule and track the member’s time off, it provided the perfect fit for their need. Coordination of activities, scheduling meetings, and tracking who is out of the office is made simple. “It has allowed our departments to work more closely together and thus be more efficient. Department Calendar is a low cost solution that yields significant time-savings.”, states Ryan.

Saving Time, Saves Money
American Enterprise Group Inc. currently has 22 department calendars deployed to approximately 600 users. According to Keith Ryan, “Although our initial need for Department Calendar started with one group, it has grown to become a central application used throughout the company. Of all the third party solutions we’ve implemented over the past few years, Department Calendar has the biggest ROI. Department Calendar is one of the few products that I feel comfortable using because it is easy to use and has contributed to the bottom line. In fact, we have estimated that with Department Calendar we experience an annual cost savings of $960 per employee.”

Sonoco Gives Department Calendar “Thumbs Up!”

Sonoco CorrFlex, a leading provider of strategic packaging displays and service solutions for retail-focused customers that operates from 21 locations world-wide, found that the calendaring solutions provided by Lotus Notes simply were not providing the company with the functionality it required.  Last year, Sonoco looked for solutions that could enhance their current IBM Lotus Notes / Domino® Calendaring and Scheduling environment at their manufacturing site located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In 2005, Sonoco’s Winston-Salem manufacturing site was still struggling under the limitations of Lotus' scheduling and calendaring software—which focuses on personal calendaring rather than group calendaring—and began to find that the inefficiencies of this software were generating unnecessary costs.  The plant was relying heavily on manual efforts, thus keeping labor cost higher than necessary, and had not yet eliminated its paper based HR system.  The IT workers at Sonoco recognized that the benefits of implementing a group calendaring system and automated time off would help to streamline the scheduling process significantly, in addition to reducing overhead.

“It was recommended by our IT technology group to save my time,” says Kitty Robert, the executive administrative assistant at Sonoco regarding Department Calendar’s ability to orchestrate multiple calendars without making multiple entries. Looking back on what her workday was like before Department Calendar, she comments that “I had to schedule seven calendars individually.  I spent entirely too much time trying to control 5 or 6 calendars plus my own.”

Robert is referring to Department Calendar’s ability, through the use of side by side group calendaring, to maintain and coordinate executive calendars while consolidating everyone’s calendar and schedule information into the centralized Domino databases.  By compiling entries from personal calendars into one or more group calendars based on the organization’s needs, Department Calendar helped to satisfy the needs of Sonoco’s associates for a group calendaring tool. Robert recognized immediately how a powerful scheduling tool like the one provided by Department Calendar can increase employee productivity significantly.

At Sonoco, the deployment plan started out small. Mark Cini, Systems Administrator of Sonoco, says that “Department Calendar was implemented with an initial small scope in mind, limited to a small workgroup with shared calendaring functionality only.” Upon viewing the increase in productivity from such a small-scale deployment, they decided to expand the company’s use of the product.  “We next moved the shared calendaring up to the site level.  Once that was in place, the Time Off was implemented by one department and an entire location replaced their current HR paper-based process.” And by segmenting the organization’s calendars by department, Sonoco was able to give each associate the appropriate level of team calendaring information they needed in order to book and respond to meeting requests in a timely manner, thereby ensuring that organizational goals were met.

Cini adds that the users at Sonoco have also been pleased with the system, commenting that Department Calendar enables them to view quickly everyone's schedule from a single location, “which is extremely helpful in a customer-focused business where workloads must shift due to vacation/time-off schedules.”

Overall, the associates at Sonoco expressed unanimous assent—Department Calendar is definitely a product that they would recommend to other companies. “Department Calendar is a good value for our business,” Cini says, “because of the easy to use capabilities right out of the box with no customization or user intervention necessary.” He adds to this that the only service Sonoco has ever required on the product was initial install.  “And it went flawlessly.”

Are You Using ‘Workaround Methods’ to Get Group Calendaring Functionality for Notes?

When Notes 'Calendaring & Scheduling' is not enough
Notes calendaring and scheduling provides robust calendaring functionality, however, group calendaring is not one of them. Notes calendaring was not designed to support viewing centralized, team calendars. Most companies have a definite need to see their team's activities in single group calendar, which is why users of Notes calendaring and scheduling sometimes resort to using roundabout ways to meet their needs. Mail-in databases and mail files with shared calendaring privileges are sometimes used to accomplish this task. However, this cumbersome 'band-aid' approach is limited at best and is full of issues like replication conflicts, dual entries, poor performance and management headaches.

Department Calendar makes Group Calendaring easy
Department Calendar provides group calendaring with ease. Department Calendar adds to the robust functionality resident in Notes Calendaring and Scheduling by displaying the user's calendar entries in a group calendar database. Managers, secretaries and basic users will benefit from seeing their teams activities consolidated in a group calendar view. Multiple views that sort by People, by Meetings, by Categories and by Resource Reservations make getting the information that you need quick and easy. Users simply continue to schedule their entries through their personal calendars and Department Calendar does the rest.

Group Calendaring and Much More
With Department Calendar's robust features, it seems like you are getting multiple applications for the price of one! Features like Time Off Scheduling & Tracking (with approval routing), Sign In/ Out Status Board, Direct Entries (with bi-directional synchronization), Department Events Scheduling & Notification, and a Department Bulletin Board provide more functionality than any other group calendar application on the market.

Department Calendar's Time Off section is basically an application within an application! Scheduling and tracking employee's time off has never been easier. With the variety of views provided, managers have easy access to calendar views, summary views, views by time off type and by status. Using Department Calendar's Time Off section is as simple as this:

1. The user submits a Time Off request
2. The request is automatically routed via email to the designated Manager/Approver for approval
3. Once the request is approved, the user is notified via email, and a calendar entry for this request appears
   on the user's personal calendar and in Department Calendar
4. Approved Time off requests can also be automatically sent to an additional person/ group, such as the HR group, for official reporting

With Department Calendar, workaround methods of obtaining group calendaring are no longer necessary. Department Calendar is easy to deploy, manage and use. A great group calendaring tool for any organization, whether large or small.

A Client's Perspective:
The world’s leading provider of planning, consulting, mechanical and electrical construction and facilities services describes the benefits received using Department Calendar:

“We required a more productive solution to view our team's activities, reduce our meeting conflicts and create calendar entries without allowing users direct access to each others mail file. Department Calendar allows us to seamlessly integrate the user's individual activities into one common place. The direct entry function is a perfect fit for our needs as well, allowing entries to be created from within Department Calendar and synchronized to the users personal calendar. In addition, we are very impressed with the Time off approval routing feature and the many different views Department Calendar offered. From a pure IT perspective, the solution is easy to deploy, maintain and use. The last thing we needed was another solution to maintain daily. We project a reduction of over 400 hours of Domino Administrative work annually by simply eliminating the creation of mail files for the purpose of calendar use. Furthermore, once a Department Calendar is deployed we find the solution runs trouble free."

Department Calendar Provides Web Supported Group Calendaring plus a Time Off scheduling tool and Sign In/Out Board

A California County Government Agency with 1600 employees, found that their UNIX-based, main-frame mail system was no longer supported within the industry. The county was directed to move to a pc-based, enterprise solution - Lotus Notes was their choice. Migration from The UNIX main-frame system lead to a loss of their electronic calendar capability. The Information Technology department needed to find a solution to augment Lotus Notes’ calendaring system and would run smoothly through a web browser.

After researching available solutions, Logic Springs Technologies’ Department Calendar was selected to satisfy their group calendaring needs. Department Calendar is a Domino-based, web-enabled, group calendaring add-on to Lotus’ standard Notes calendaring and scheduling. It consolidates user’s calendars entries from their personal mail files and displays them in a group calendar database. Users can also create calendar entries from within Department Calendar with the option of migrating the entries to their personal Notes calendars. Department Calendar provided the functionality that this county agency needed – web enabled group calendaring that allows users the ability to view the group calendar and also create calendar entries from the web.

Department Calendar User-Friendly
According to this agency’s IT Analyst, “We explored the various features of Department Calendar and were impressed by the user-friendly interface and the scalability of information interchange between the user’s individual Notes Calendar and Department Calendar. The interaction between the two calendaring systems is smooth and unobtrusive to the user”. They were very pleased to hear the positive feedback from their users who remarked, “Wow, this is really great!”

Additional Features a Bonus
Additionally, they found the Sign In/Out and Vacation Requests features to be a real bonus. The IT Analyst comments, “The Sign In/Out feature is very useful, especially in departments which have staff spread out over several locations that were miles apart” and “The electronic vacation requesting has become preferable over the previous (paper) system”.

• The Sign In/Out feature displays the whereabouts of individuals in your group during that particular day. This simple view serves as a quick reference as to who is out of the office, where they are and when they will return.
  
• Vacation approvals provide an electronic means of requesting vacation time and has additional routing available (ideal for HR dept) for approved vacations. Approved Vacations are displayed on the users personal calendar, the main Department Calendar, and the Vacation Calendar.

Customer Service is Outstanding
Department Calendar not only delivered the functionality that was required but also provided additional features that have become very popular with the users. And when asked about the level of service they received with Department Calendar, the reply was, “In a word, OUTSTANDING. From marketing to support, every single person I dealt with or talked to has been extremely helpful, informative, and eager to please”.