Aon Improves SharePoint Adoption With harmon.ie
Aon Hewitt, a global leader in human resources (HR) consulting and outsourcing, reached close to 100% adoption of SharePoint with harmon.ie. The result: Aon Hewitt delivers value to clients while realizing regulatory and guidance requirements. At Aon-Hewitt, harmon.ie makes knowledge management across offices and geographies a success.
Organizational Background
As a consultancy, Aon Hewitt’s business depends heavily on managing knowledge and information, which is contained not only in documents but also in email communications between clients and teams of advisers. Keeping all team members on the same page—literally—can be difficult. “Team effort and collaboration is absolutely critical,” explains Dominic Makemson, principal consultant at Aon Hewitt U.K. “If a client asks for something, we need to be able to quickly find the right information in our system.”
The Challenge
Makemson’s group, in particular, provides advice to both corporations that sponsor pension plans as well as the trustees that administer them. The two parties are advised independently, so the firm has to control access to certain information and document how it maintains that access control. The firm must also comply with many regulatory mandates and professional standards, such as those published by the U.K.’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, not to mention Aon Hewitt’s own internal standards regarding quality, data security, privacy, and conflicts of interest.
Moreover, Aon Hewitt needed to improve collaborative processes and project management across all offices and geographies with better document and email management. “We’ve got more and more remote or agile people working in different offices, even people in different countries like Budapest and India,” says Makemson. Aon’s business processes needed to provide seamless information access anytime, anywhere.
The company had been using a combination of paper and IBM Notes applications as its knowledge and document management system, but it was not comprehensive. Documents were not always stored in the same place. Emails were not necessarily stored along with the relevant documents. Aon Hewitt needed one repository for all emails and documents, organized by project and easily searchable.
The Solution
When it transitioned to Microsoft tools, Aon Hewitt chose SharePoint for managing its document and email-based interactions with clients. The firm customized SharePoint to implement its specific business processes, integrating the company’s time-billing system, organizing work into project folders and automating various approval chains to ensure audit trails. But the company still needed a way to capture and save emails in SharePoint. It also realized that the entire system had to be easy and intuitive so consultants would use it.
After evaluating several options, it adopted harmon.ie because it allowed access to SharePoint through Outlook. With harmon.ie, users could drag and drop emails directly from Outlook into SharePoint, thus ensuring they were saved in the appropriate place and searchable when others in the team needed to see the latest communications with a client.
“Why wouldn’t you want to work from your email window?” asks Makemson. “That’s where we spend 90% of our time.”
Aon Hewitt rolled out the SharePoint system, powered by harmon.ie and branded “PulsePoint,” to its 2,000 consultants across the U.K., Holland, and Switzerland. The rollout focused on explaining the business processes, rather than the technology. Becauseof harmon.ie’s intuitive interface with Outlook, “we didn’t need to train much,” says Makemson.
Reaching Business Goals
The PulsePoint system, powered by harmon.ie, helps Aon Hewitt accomplish its business goals by ensuring that business processes are implemented and by enabling better communications and collaboration among team members within the same office and across multiple geographical locations. This allows Aon Hewitt to improve knowledge retention—and therefore achieve better project management and client service across Aon’s global offices—enabling the organization to more effectively fulfill its business obligations.
With harmon.ie offering enhanced SharePoint access directly from Outlook, both local and international colleagues can collaborate on draft emails and documents in cross-office and remote or agile work settings before sending approved versions to clients. One user can write a proposed email, click “save draft,” and the system sends the draft version to a colleague as a SharePoint link.
“Because it’s so easy to use with harmon.ie, we’ve achieved 95%-100% adoption of SharePoint in the first year,” states Makemson.
PulsePoint simplifies other mundane, but important, business processes, such as keeping track of billing codes and easing communication and collaboration tasks for the team. For example, it automatically files a copy of emails and attachments sent regarding a project, so no communication is missed because someone neglected to manually upload an email to SharePoint. When working on an email, the user can click a button that shows the location of all the material relevant to that client, and can navigate to those emails and documents with a single click.
Future Plans
Already, harmon.ie has played an important role in the successful use of SharePoint at Aon Hewitt. Makemson notes that because it’s so easy to use with harmon.ie, SharePoint adoption is almost 100%. In the next phase of the project, Aon Hewitt plans to improve search capabilities, integrate Skype for Business and Yammer, provide better mobile access to the system, and expand use to other business units.
harmon.ie helps Microsoft customers increase their adoption and return on investments in SharePoint, Office 365, and other Microsoft collaboration products, thereby enabling Email Management, Records Management, Knowledge Retention, and Notes to Outlook migration initiatives. For more information, visit us on the web at https://harmon.ie, or contact us at info@harmon.ie and 1.800.624.6946.