Tech Team Accelerates Business Growth Using IOCOM Integrated Collaboration Solution

Tech Team is a global provider of Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing services to Fortune 1,000 companies and government entities. Some of the major clients are Ford Motor Company, John Deere, UPS, Honda, Micros, Cendant, the European Commission, Essilor, Canon Europe, and US Government agencies. Offices are located around the globe including in Southfield and Dearborn, Michigan; Davenport, Iowa; Chantilly, Virginia; Portsmouth, Rhode Island; Germantown, Maryland, Gent and Brussels, Belgium; Bucharest, Romania; Gothenburg Sweden; Middlesex, United Kingdom; and Cologne, Germany.

Over the last 2 years, Tech Team has experienced significant business and workforce growth, and completed 3 major acquisitions. Tech Team requires that groups and individuals located around the world work together, and develop personal relationships “like they would if they were all co-located in the same place.” It is also critically important for new employees and acquisitions to be brought up-to-speed and integrated with the rest of the company as quickly as possible to satisfy customer demands and achieve expected merger benefits.

Tech Team chose the inSORS IG2 solution for its easy to use, live collaborative environment that is available on-demand providing voice and video, as well as, the tools and functionality required for people all over the world to effectively work together. “In 2002, we had several video conferencing systems but they were all collecting dust in a corner of our meeting rooms,” said Larry Granger COO of Tech Team. “We were looking for a solution that in addition to providing exceptional audio and video quality could effectively involve multiple people and locations using either PCs, or large conference rooms, and could integrate the applications and tools our people use to get the job done.”

With IG2, Tech Team brings its people and customers together face-to- face, as needed. Granger said “using the multiple simultaneous views and integrated functionality such as whiteboarding, recording and data and file sharing, our teams are able to effectively work together in real- time, accelerating project implementations to quickly and effectively deliver to our customers.

“We may deliver a solution from Southfield Michigan, Brussels Belgium, and Bucharest Romania. Our teams need to know each other, work together on-the-fly and deliver services seamlessly to our customers from anywhere in the world. We use IG2 to make this happen on an every day basis,” said Granger.

Collaboration Requires More Than Quality Voice and Video

Granger says that high quality audio and video is a must have, but more is needed for multi-location work to be effective. Each participant must be able to see, hear, and manage all other participants. Additionally, parties off system on existing phone and video conferencing solutions must also be included. IG2 combines interoperability with H.323 videoconferencing systems, full-duplex audio with standard and wide band codecs, H.264 video compression for improved video quality at all bandwidths; and secure firewall and NAT traversal all within the existing IP network infrastructure.

“As we integrated our acquisitions we needed to connect immediately, but our acquisitions were not equipped to do that,” said Granger. “With inSORS, we overnighted a camera and headset (it cost us about $80) and downloaded the software in minutes and immediately held a meeting using existing network connections to the Internet.”

The Future of the Truly Collaborative Global Enterprise

In a global company, true collaboration is often hindered by conferencing systems that were primarily designed for scheduled room-to-room meetings. Tech Team understood the need to connect desktops, mobile workers, conferencing rooms and executive workstations. Today Tech Team uses IG2 in:

•    Rooms and desktops in the corporate offices in Detroit Michigan

•    A room and several desktops in divisional offices in Virginia and Maryland

•    A room and several desktops in the European headquarters in Belgium

•    A room and several desktops in the Romanian delivery center; and

•    Over 25 mobile desktops used by top executives located around the globe

With IG2, Tech Team holds scheduled meetings and trainings as well as on-demand team meetings and recruitment activities.

“Today every executive in our company uses IG2 for daily meetings,” Granger said. “We are working on further roll out to desktops, laptops and home offices for our mobile workforce, as well as integration of IG2 into our customer support teams.”

Executive Summary

Founded in 1979 Tech Team is a global provider of information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) to Fortune 1000 corporations, government agencies, and service organizations. Headquartered in Southfield Michigan. Tech Team delivers global, multilingual help-desk services and specialized IT solutions through offices in the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Germany, Brussels, Romania, and through our wholly owned subsidiaries Digital Support Corporation, Sytel, TechTeam A.N.E., and TechTeam Cyntergy. Drawing on 25 years of experience touching every point of the IT process, Tech Team has developed a proven Single-Point-of-Contact (SPOC) delivery model that offers support efficiencies and cost savings by integrating self-service, service desk, remote monitoring, and on-site support solutions. Tech Team tailors these solutions and services to the specific business environments of a broad range of vertical industries, including automotive, consumer, pharmaceutical, hospitality, insurance, financial services, manufacturing, government, and education.

Business Situation

In recent years, Tech Team has quickly grown its global service business. With more than 2,000 employees around the world, from Romania to Detroit, and an aggressive acquisition schedule, Tech Team was looking to effectively bring groups, teams and individual employees together collaboratively in order to meet the needs of their customers. A key to Tech Team’s market success is its steadfast focus on quality customer service. Raising the bar on customer care, Tech Team’s business required an effective way to reach its clients fact-to-face whenever and wherever they were.

Business Scenario

Larry Granger COO, Tech Team Global, is a line business manager who turned to inSORS for the tools they needed to grow their revenue and business. Granger needed a way to reduce the cost of global travel while at the same time increase the cohesion and effectiveness of disparate teams and individuals working together, in real-time, to solve real customer problems. An aggressive acquisition schedule made it necessary to quickly ramp-up new employees and effectively roll out new services to existing teams.

Benefits

With inSORS IG2, Tech Team received integrated, voice, video, and data combined with the collaboration tools and functionality they need in a single solution that could scale from the laptop to the large conference room. With IG2 Tech Team achieved:

•    Significant reductions in international and domestic travel spending

•    Increased employee productivity

•    Accelerated project implementation

•    Faster acquisition integration

•    Increased employee safety and satisfaction

inSORS Customer Insights

“With inSORS, we could overnight a camera and headset (it cost us about $80) and download the software in minutes and immediately hold a meeting over existing connections to the Internet.”

Larry Granger, COO, Tech Team

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