Customer Solution Case Study Food-Processing Giant Delivers Extensible Solution, Cuts Maintenance Costs Two-Thirds Overview Country or Region: United States Industry: Manufacturing Customer Profile Since its founding in 1935, Tyson Foods has grown to become one of the world’s largest producers of protein products. Business Situation Tyson Foods relies heavily on sophisticated image management, but its existing solution was difficult to enhance and extend and costly to support and maintain. Solution Tyson Foods migrated its solution and simultaneously upgraded its collaboration environment to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Benefits Easy solution enhancement and extension Development time down by nearly 75 percent Maintenance costs down by “By replacing a Documentum environment with one based on SharePoint, we are reducing those maintenance costs by two-thirds.” Rebecca Wilson, Project Leader, Productivity Management Tyson Foods Tyson Foods, one of the world’s leading producers of protein products, needed a more extensible solution for scanning, storing, and providing access to thousands of document images. A solution based on EMC2 Documentum Platform and installed in 2006 was difficult to customize or extend to new user groups and costly to maintain. IT executives, who were already familiar with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a collaboration platform, decided to move the Documentum-based solution to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise while upgrading their collaboration solution to that same platform. Now, employees have far greater access to image management, new development is done in just of the time, and maintenance costs have been reduced by two-thirds. management management
solution to fewer than one in three of the individuals who could have enjoyed some productivity gains from it. This was hardly the best application of our significant investment.” To make matter worse, maintenance of the Documentum-based solution was costing the company dearly. This cost stemmed from a comprehensive contract for support, service, training, and upgrades that Tyson Foods had signed when it envisioned keeping the solution in place for many years. Solution A turning point came for Wilson and her colleagues after they tried in vain for more than six months to upgrade the image-management solution to a new version of the EMC2 Documentum Platform. “At some point, the version of Documentum on which we were running the solution would no longer be supported,” explains, Mark Barron, Lead Programmer Analyst at Tyson Foods. “Clearly, we needed to consider something different.” “Industrial-Strength Technology” What Barron and his colleagues did consider was different, but it was also familiar: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the earlier versions of which the company had come to know and appreciate. “We had used Microsoft SharePoint technologies since the and had been using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for collaboration projects since 2008,” Barron points out. “Based on that experience, we considered SharePoint an industrial-strength technology, and an excellent candidate for enterprise-scale document management.” Before deciding to move from Documentum to SharePoint Server 2010, however, Barron and his colleagues wanted to address some key concerns. These concerns included the way SharePoint Server 2010 handles disaster recovery, its ability to scale to manage the rising volume of document images at Tyson Foods, and the product’s support for close integration with SAP. Tyson Foods uses SAP as its corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and requires interfaces between that product’s accounting, human resources, export, and manufacturing components and image management. Expertise from Microsoft Technology Center To address those concerns, later that year Barron, Wilson, and two others from Tyson Foods attended a three-day Architecture Design Session at a Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Dallas, Texas. They were accompanied by consultants from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Hitachi Consulting, which had worked with Tyson Foods for more than 12 years. Because the SharePoint-based solution envisioned by Tyson Foods would be supported by a repository based on Microsoft SQL Server, the team asked experts in that technology about how to design the repository specifically to address based
Having multiple SharePoint Server experts throughout the company, as well as a large user base already licensed on and experienced with the product, provides significant economies-of-scale at Tyson Foods. “By replacing a Documentum environment with one based on SharePoint, we are reducing those maintenance costs by two-thirds,” Wilson says. “Combining this with what we’ll save by retiring the third-party and self-developed solutions used in some business units, we expect to see a return on our SharePoint-based investment in just two years.” Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the Web. For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to: