Emirates Steel and Microsoft 365 Adoption
In the previous blog post, we shared some insights into getting a better ROI and saving one day a week with Microsoft Teams. The article relied on extensive research, demonstrating how having a unified communication and collaboration tool leads to a significant expense reduction.
Last week was very exciting because we had a chance to host Aisha Al Ahmad from Emirates Steel in our webinar “Cutting Costs with Microsoft Teams”. Aisha shared some insights and tips from Emirates Steel's experience with Microsoft 365 adoption.
Emirates Steel had an existing Office 365 subscription, but the end-users were not utilizing it.
The opportunity to optimize the investment and to maximize Office 365 usage came last year.
“Cloud for Work assisted us on the adoption journey and together we designed the adoption program. To increase utilization, we initiated the project by creating a roadmap. This was during the last quarter of 2019. First, we defined our sponsor and got the executive buy-in, then we selected the project team members. They included various employees from different departments, like information technology, human capital, communication, finance, strategy, sales, operations... “
One of the keystones was to identify the champions who will support the adoption. Emirates Steel was performing the frequent assessment of Office 365 utilization, as well as technical assessment. “Cloud for Work helped us in identifying valuable use cases,” Aisha said. This was followed by multiple Awareness Events, with demo and hands-on activities. “Office 365 is very rich and it has multiple tools to support day-to-day activities in various areas and departments.”
Emirates steel has also done one-to-one activation with its executives and managers, along with their co-workers, and performed hands-on activities for them to feel the value of Office 365. In addition to the completed activities, this journey continues – Aisha adds that up until today, the awareness for the users is ongoing, reminding and updating them about the new enhancements or the features.
So what was the gain of this adoption? During the regular working days, there are more than 5000 chat messages exchanged and 300 calls.
“Most of our employees feel the simplicity of the solution and have become our volunteer champions for Office 365. They are teaching their colleagues and coworkers. It has become a lifestyle” – Aisha says.
But, in addition to simplifying the ways the employees work, it is also reducing the costs. “The employees are hosting online meetings instead of traveling. We have removed various duplicated applications with a cut of applications with similar functionalities. But, the biggest advantage of this adoption came when the employees were faced with working from home, during the COVID19 pandemic. Employees were familiar with Microsoft Teams, so the challenges of working from home were eliminated.”
If you have been wondering, there are numerous tools that belong to Office 365 subscription. You are most probably familiar with some of them, such as your Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel. But there is a variety of other tools that can help you work more efficiently and improve the collaboration flow in your organization – from online meetings and file collaboration to whiteboarding, conducting surveys, and task management. Some of those tools are:
To download the original presentation, email us at connect@cloudforwork.com