Manufacturing

Since its beginnings as a cooperage in 1877, Delaware, Ohio-based Greif, Inc. (Greif) has grown into one of the largest industrial packaging manufacturers in the world. Today Greif employs 9,500 people in 40 countries, and provides steel, plastic, fiber, corrugated and multi-wall containers to just about every industry imaginable.

The company's most explosive growth occurred over the past few years. In 1998 Greif purchased Sonoco's industrial packaging business, making Greif the dominant North American player in the industrial shipping container business. And in 2001 Greif purchased Van Leer Industrial, another global packaging leader - an acquisition that doubled Greif's size.

The Van Leer acquisition came with an IT challenge: roughly 3,500 new employees, worldwide, who had standardized on IBM Lotus Notes and Domino for e-mail and applications. Greif had standardized on Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

"We couldn't live very long with the two systems and continue to look like one company, " explains James Hayes, System Analyst at Greif. So Hayes and a team consisting of people from every business unit in the company conducted a due diligence evaluation of the two systems, Exchange vs. Domino.

A key consideration was whether Microsoft could port a couple of Van Leer Notes applications that were already proving their mettle at Greif.

"Van Leer brought us two workflow systems - one news application and one info centre application - that automated and improved the way we approved and distributed news, company policies, forms, and so on," says Hayes. "Before these applications we were distributing this kind of information via e-mail, sometimes 3000 messages with attachments at a time, and lots of the recipients were using dial-up connections. The applications were much more efficient."

So Hayes, himself a Microsoft Certified Professional, invited Microsoft to try to provide the same applications using Exchange. But the results didn't compare. At the same time, Greif started to see Notes and Domino as a much better solution for meeting their increasingly global business requirements.

"If we were in it just for messaging, we would have kept Exchange," says Mike Barilla, Vice President of Business Information Services at Greif. "But we realized that our large global customers were using Domino TeamRooms, and other capabilities not in Exchange, to collaborate globally with their business partners. If we wanted to be a truly global organization and continue to go after those kinds of customers, we knew Notes and Domino were the way to go."

Greif decided to deploy Notes and Domino themselves, after consulting with Ohio-based Lotus Business Partner 3X Corporation. "3X laid out the risk points and potential obstacles, and helped us lay out a workable schedule," says Hayes. "Then we rolled out Notes and Domino manually, to save money, to 100 or 120 seats per week using a remote control program. And we replaced the Exchange Servers, hardware and all, with Domino Servers."

Colleen White, the Greif IT manager who led the implementation, says that "from a project management perspective the implementation was ideal. We did it ourselves, our consulting dollars were minimal, and we met our scope, time and cost targets. This should be encouraging for companies considering similar implementations in times like these."

Domino and Notes enabled Greif to extend the newly acquired applications to everyone at the company. But Hayes soon began to see other significant, everyday advantages of working with Domino and Notes instead of Exchange and Outlook.

"With Exchange we were basically running our business and sharing documents via e-mail, and revision control was difficult," says Hayes. "Domino's TeamRoom application has minimized this problem for us, keeping all our shared documents in one central repository and eliminating the need for huge amounts of e-mail storage. Development of some other Domino applications is further helping to manage our shared resource environment."

"With our Domino servers, we have better performance, reliability and availability," says Hayes. "The Domino servers either aren't going down at all, or with clustering we aren't noticing when they do. It's a much more robust system," says White.

Hayes adds that Domino?"has drastically improved our backup and recovery times. With Exchange we had to back up all the messages on a server, which took 30-40 hours, whereas Domino lets us back up any user's mail file, individually, in about two hours. To restore an Exchange mailbox took a day and required creating a replica of the server on which it resided. Since moving to Notes, I can restore any Notes mailbox in just a few minutes."

"We have various types of users, including the foresters in remote woodland locations who manage our timberlands," says Hayes. (Greif owns and manages more than 300,000 acres of timberland in the United States and Canada through its Soterra LLC subsidiary.) "But we were able to do much of the training over the phone, training representatives in a two-hour telly-training session, and letting them go back and teach their groups."

Greif Administrative Coordinator Joice Viets, who coordinated the initial Notes training, was especially pleased with help she got from Lotus. "For a nominal fee per user, Lotus sent us a package of CDs with training materials for our administrators, our training contractor, our own training staff and our users. Instead of warehousing manuals, we could print them as needed, or distribute them online to cut costs. And Lotus' training consultants helped us put together the training that would meet our needs."

Hayes claims that since completing the switch-over from Outlook to Notes in September of 2002, the Greif Help Desk receives 30-40% fewer e-mail related calls each month. "We had been experiencing increased helpdesk calls," Hayes says. But Notes' Help is very supportive of users, and the error messages are very specific, so most folks can help themselves." Viets agrees. "People are a lot more likely to get answers from the Notes Help because it's more like a book, with detailed explanations and links to more information. In particular we get far less repeat questions about how to do things."

Greif's help desk personnel also document problems and solutions in a Notes-based knowledge base, where users can help themselves to Help.

"When we started explaining replication to our foresters, who connect via dial-up, you could see their eyes light up once they realized they didn't have to be connected all the time," says Viets. "With Notes you can replicate to make everything current, then go off-line and do your work, and then get back online to replicate."

Greif currently has all sorts of Domino applications underway or on the table, for everything from documenting and tracking safety, environmental and employee concerns for OSHA compliance, to managing Greif's timberland properties. The company is also piloting IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime), and IBM Lotus Team Work Place (QuickPlace). Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing let remote team members collaborate and meet online; Lotus Team Work Place lets teams create secure workspaces on the Web, where they can share resources and collaborate on documents. Hayes expects a healthy return from each.

"One group has plans to use Lotus Web Conferencing for online training, which will save travel costs, and our online order management team wants to establish a Lotus Instant Messaging rep who can answer questions customers have while placing orders, which will save phone costs," says Hayes. "We plan to use Lotus Team Work Place to set up areas where our people and customers can share and even co-author documents online, which will be faster and a lot less expensive than in-person meetings and using overnight mail."

Barilla adds that Notes lets Greif create applications it would otherwise have to buy. "We were looking at a travel and entertainment expense reporting application from IBM, but we realized that we had the expertise to create it with Notes," he says. "And on a larger scale, we've also decided to build our intranet with Domino. Again, we could have bought other tools, but we don't have to, and now that Lotus is marrying Domino to some of its Web development tools we know we'll get more of the functionality we need."

Efficiencies like these represent just a fraction of the value Hayes sees in Greif's switch to Notes and Domino. "Our migration from Microsoft Exchange/Outlook to Lotus Notes/Domino was one of the smartest tactical and logistical moves of my 12 year IT career," he says. "With Domino we've transformed slow, e-mail based processes into streamlined Domino applications we can share company-wide. And I'm convinced Domino positions us to integrate with far more back-end applications than we could with Exchange or any other solution."