VirtualWorks - Eksportfinans

Established in 1962 by a consortium of Norwegian banks, Eksportfinans provides competitive, long-term financing to foreign buyers as well as to Norwegian companies with revenues in foreign exchange. With 2010 lending of NOK 33.7 billion, it contributes to the success of the export sector by enabling projects in the shipping, oil and gas, and energy industries. The Norwegian government became a shareholder in 2001.

Key Challenges

Proliferation of both structured and unstructured data with no way to see everything all at once.
Underutilization of central archiving system due to fear of "losing" data.
Document hoarding on individuals' hard drives.
Wasted time spent looking through archived data.
Parallel efforts by multiple employees due to lack of knowledge sharing.

Financial, Strategic and Operational Benefits

Single-point information access across the entire organization.
Employee confidence in finding what they need, when they need it.
Improved employee productivity through easily accessible shared knowledge and collaboration.
Elimination of wasted employee time and duplication of efforts by multiple employees.
Delivery of a better customer experience through faster response times.

Why VirtualWorks was Selected

Easy integration to increase ROI of existing IT investment.
Low total cost of ownership.
Ability to index a variety of file types, even scans and images.
Preserves existing system and document security authentication levels of Microsoft Active Directory.

Implementation Best Practices

Inclusion of all information silos at the beginning of the process.
Technology demos to facilitate ease-of-use.
Integration with existing security structure for fast and safe implementation.
Demonstration of instant benefits to speed adoption.

As an export-financing credit institution, readily available information is a mission critical resource for Oslo, Norway-based Eksportfinans. And with over 40% of Norwegian GDP coming from exports, employees' ability to locate the right documentation at the right time couldn't be more important.

Increasing ROI of the Existing IT Investment
When Eksportfinans discovered that many employees had begun to create personal archives, essentially hoarding information that would benefit colleagues and the organization as a whole,
it knew it needed an internal indexing solution. Anne Garberg, Application Manager explained: "Many people told me, 'I don't want to use the company archive system because I'm afraid I won't find the documents that I archived, so I'm making my own archive locally to ensure I can find what I'm looking for when I need it.' Our main problem was to find data that we had archived. Since the number of documents just keeps growing, it became very difficult for people to find the things they needed. They were using a lot of time, for many, up to an hour a day, trying to find documents."

Easy Implementation and Low TCO
After learning about VirtualWorks from its archive vendor, Garberg said "We could easily see the benefits. VirtualWorks would make it easier to find the files we were looking for, and the cost was not very high." Eksportfinans hit the ground running to implement VirtualWorks for its main document handling system, and seeing the value immediately added its email server and the
rest of the company's data sources. Since VirtualWorks leverages existing system and document security levels of Microsoft Active Directory, implementation was both quick and simple.

Uncovering Lost Files to Deliver Rapid Results
With VirtualWorks integrated across the organization, employee adoption came easily. And the benefits have far exceeded the expectation of simply saving time finding documents. "I know it saves me time," said Garberg, but beyond that, "I can look up what somebody else has written about a problem I am working on."

In fact, the collaborative and learning benefits for Eksportfinans have helped to change the way Garberg works, "I can feel assured that if I'm going to do a job and I want to find relevant information, I use VirtualWorks' query function first, and if I don't find any related documents,
well, then I can be pretty sure that we don't have a document regarding it."

Across the organization, employees are able to leverage work they, or others, have done in the past to generate business results in real-time.

Download this document in PDF format