Major U.S. Gas Company Boosts, Refines Information Access, Increasing Risk Avoidance

Microsoft Office System Customer Solution Case Study

Overview “Productivity is the no-brainer benefit of Office Country or Region: United States Industry: Energy—Oil and gas SharePoint Server…. It was intuitively clear to us from the beginning that Office SharePoint Server would Customer Profile Southern Union Company, based in make us more productive.” Houston, Texas, is engaged primarily in Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer Service, Southern Union the transportation, storage, gathering, processing, and distribution of natural Southern Union, one of the largest diversified natural gas gas. The company has 2,750 employees. companies in the United States, faced a challenge familiar to Business Situation most large, fast-growing companies: the need to use informa- Southern Union needed to make its ever- increasing amounts of information more tion to support growth rather than put up roadblocks to that accessible and relevant to support con- growth. Employees needed faster access to authorized informa- tinued growth, while fostering company cohesiveness and boosting collaboration tion and a better way to boost security around restricted data. and work processes. They needed to share information not only with team members

Solution within the company, but also with business partners. The com- The company adopted a communications pany now has the solution it needs in Microsoft® Office and collaboration platform based on SharePoint® Server 2007. Southern Union has used the software Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 that includes an intranet, team sites, to create a comprehensive and highly successful information and automated workflows. platform that is unifying employees throughout the company, Benefits increasing the speed and accuracy of collaboration and work  Single information platform promotes company cohesiveness processes.  Granular security settings facilitate increased use  Centralized resources foster productivity, collaboration, risk avoidance “We needed a solution Situation out-of-date documents. Processes that Southern Union Company has been depended on passing information through with greater risk growing rapidly, both organically and e-mail could stall or fail if e-mail messages through mergers and acquisitions. The were missed or misdirected. The lack of an avoidance. The result is one of the largest diversified effective search mechanism across file alternative could result natural gas companies in the United States, share directories and e-mail folders meant with operations in 17 states, more than that information often couldn’t be found in business process 20,000 miles of pipeline, and one of North unless an employee already knew the America’s biggest liquefied natural gas document’s name or location, or both. breakdowns, or even import terminals. Neither mechanism gave document fines, and increase our creators and administrators sufficient Paralleling the company’s growth is an control over who could access content. costs.” increased need for workers to share documents, such as those detailing “We needed a solution with greater risk Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer Service, Southern Union operating procedures, and collaborate on avoidance,” says Yarbrough. “The alterna- projects. Therefore, employees must be tive could result in business process break- able to create, distribute, and access downs, or even fines, and increase our information quickly and easily—whether to costs.” help build a new pipeline or to provide audit documentation in compliance with Solution the federal government’s Sarbanes-Oxley Southern Union found that solution when Act. But the means of managing informa- Yarbrough and her colleagues attended a tion at Southern Union had not kept up presentation on Microsoft® Office with its regulatory and business require- SharePoint® Server 2007. ments. E-mail was the chief means of distributing information; file shares were “The benefits of Office SharePoint Server the chief means of storing them. An intra- 2007 were so clear that we could easily net portal existed, but wasn’t much used. communicate this to management to justify adopting the software,” says Poor information flow was negatively Yarbrough. “It was clear that Office affecting the company’s cohesiveness, its SharePoint Server wasn’t just a file security practices, and its productivity. “It management system. Microsoft Office, was more important than ever that we act SharePoint, and Microsoft Exchange Server as one company, but our information technologies work together in a way that management practices didn’t support that,” would help us manage information and says Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT promote collaboration.” Customer Service, Southern Union. “We weren’t getting information out consis- One of the first purposes to which Southern tently to all of our employees; we had a Union put Office SharePoint Server 2007 paper newsletter and e-mail communi- was as the foundation for a new intranet cations, but they were not doing the job.” information platform. The platform is a single location through which employees Nor were file shares and e-mail helping to can access all corporate applications. It also promote security and productivity. E-mail serves as a news channel for the company, distribution could breed multiple versions hosting headlines that employees can click of a document, creating confusion and through to learn about companywide making it easy for employees to work with information and news from other divisions. “SharePoint provides a Business users create content and post the uses Office SharePoint Server to manage information themselves, without having to this. The company creates temporary great degree of flexibility rely on the IT department. collaboration sites and gives authorized vendors access to them through a virtual to manage and control While the intranet is a resource to dissem- private network connection with Secure all aspects of the sites.” inate information throughout the company, Sockets Layer security. Vendors are given users can also tailor distribution of their Active Directory credentials that limit their Willie Johnson, Vice President of Business information to specific divisions or disci- access to the relevant sites and even to Assessment, Integration, and Compliance, plines, based on Windows Server® Active particular documents within those sites. Southern Union Directory® profiles. The intranet also When the project or collaboration with a includes a company directory and a search vendor is completed, Southern Union feature, and Southern Union is implement- decommissions the site. ing the Best Bets feature in Office SharePoint Server to make search results Southern Union executives have used even more useful. SharePoint sites for collaboration on multiple projects with more than 100 third- Facilitating Document Management party contacts and more than 10,000 Southern Union uses Microsoft Office documents. The sites can be set up in a Professional 2007 and Office SharePoint matter of hours and are easy to access; Server 2007 together to facilitate document executives also find it easy to update, add, management. Versioning capabilities help and redistribute documents. to ensure that employees are working with the current version of an Office document, “SharePoint provides a great degree of and check-in/check-out technology flexibility to manage and control all aspects provides an orderly process for team of the sites,” says Willie Johnson, Vice members or others to collaborate on President of Business Assessment, document creation or editing. Integration, and Compliance at Southern Union. “We maintain control of the Changing the Way People Collaborate available documents and can establish Through its use of Office SharePoint Server security access for users all over the 2007, the company is changing the way country in a matter of hours.” Previously, people at the company collaborate. Team these projects might have involved physical collaboration sites provide a central document reviews, sites hosted by third location for all documentation related to a parties, or document exchange via DVD team’s work. Team calendars keep and e-mail. everyone on the team aware of milestones and deadlines, and task lists and contacts “We have saved tens of thousands of provide information to all members of the dollars by using SharePoint sites,” adds team. Steve Hotte, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Southern Union. At Southern Union, collaboration isn’t just an internal process. The company has a Adding Workflow to Business Processes universe of vendors with which it works, Business processes that previously were from consulting engineering firms assisting bogged down or derailed by missed or on pipeline projects to auditors. Much of misdirected e-mail messages can now be the work with these vendors calls for automated using workflow tools in document sharing, and Southern Union Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and the “Search,We no longernews, directory,have to Office InfoPath® 2007 information- Granular Security Settings Facilitate gathering program. The company’s first use Increased Use applications—weworry that employees of an automated workflow supports the The personalization capabilities of the tracking and approval of manually written platform—the ability to restrict access to designedare following the anplatform to checks for accounts payable related to a information based on an employee’s Active beoutdated a one-stop version center of the of 500-mile pipeline expansion project. Directory profile—is another boon to the Employees receive automated notification intranet’s use. “Ironically, the fact that not information.procedures—they As a result, always of payments requiring their approval, which everything that goes up on the platform is speeds up the flow and enables the entire seen by everyone helps to get more it’shave a truethe latest success.” and process to be tracked—and later audited— information up on the platform, and to greatestMagan immediately Yarbrough, Director of IT from a central site. make it more valuable,” Yarbrough says. Customer Service, Southern Union “Our business users know that their available online.” Benefits information will be treated with proper Through its use of Microsoft Office security, and that encourages them to use Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT Customer Service, Southern Union SharePoint Server 2007, Southern Union the platform to post information that isn’t has increased employees’ sense of belong- appropriate for everyone in the company.” ing to a unified company; added the ability to set document-level security, which Furthermore, because the technology can makes people more confident about be used to set security permissions down putting information online; and raised to the level of individual documents, productivity throughout the company. In Southern Union employees can implement aggregate, this leads to greater risk avoid- team collaboration sites—including ance and improved business processes. collaboration sites with vendors and other outsiders—with confidence that document Single Information Platform Promotes access is controlled between team mem- Company Cohesiveness bers and nonmembers. “You only see what Southern Union wanted a platform to help you have access to,” says Yarbrough. “If draw all its employees into one, unified someone doesn’t have access to a company, rather than functioning as a document, he or she doesn’t even see the combination of acquisitions. The company’s file name in a document library. That’s a intranet information platform, made level of security we just didn’t have before. possible by Microsoft Office SharePoint It also makes collaboration more Server 2007, has contributed to that feeling productive because you don’t have to wade of cohesiveness, according to Yarbrough. through irrelevant document lists, even in “We designed the information platform to the results of a search.” include the features that would keep employees coming back,” she says. “Search, Centralized Resources Foster news, directory, applications—we designed Productivity, Collaboration, Risk the platform to be a one-stop center of Avoidance information. As a result, it’s a true success. “Productivity is the no-brainer benefit of Everyone throughout Southern Union, Office SharePoint Server,” says Yarbrough. regardless of the division in which they “This was the easiest benefit on which to work, has access to a common set of sell the software to management. It was information and services. That’s tremen- intuitively clear to us from the beginning dously important in helping everyone feel that Office SharePoint Server would make that they’re truly working for one us more productive.” company.” “We save money And, according to Yarbrough, it has. For accuracy by eliminating the need to rekey example, instead of printing and check data, and expedited the process by because we’re not distributing operations manuals for its notifying employees as soon as they have pipelines, Southern Union now makes that checks to approve. The workflow has printing and distributing information available through a SharePoint proved so successful that Southern Union copies of the document.” document library. “First, we save money plans to expand its use to other business because we’re not printing and distributing processes and to automate the intranet Magan Yarbrough, Director of IT copies of the document,” says Yarbrough. interface to its financial system. Customer Service, Southern Union “Second, we no longer have to worry that employees are following an outdated version of the procedures—they always have the latest and greatest immediately available online. That, in turn, increases our risk avoidance by driving up compliance with standard operating procedures, and reduces the potential for fines due to regulatory noncompliance.”

Southern Union estimates that Sarbanes- Oxley Section 404 audit processes associated with documentation have been accelerated by 30 percent through the increased productivity gained through the use of Office SharePoint Server. In addition, the related costs for filing supplies, the reproduction and distribution of documents, offsite document storage, and travel to various Southern Union offices have all been significantly reduced. The company also has seen reduced costs for external auditors, as auditors are able to access the SharePoint site to pick up the latest version of Southern Union documentation, saving time and, hence, money.

Southern Union is boosting productivity through other uses of Office SharePoint Server, as well. For example, by putting all project-related milestones, contacts, assignments, and resources in a designated collaboration site, team members can work together without having to send rounds of e-mails to obtain information.

Also, the company’s automated workflow for manual check approvals has raised For More Information Microsoft Office System For more information about Microsoft The Microsoft Office system is the business products and services, call the Microsoft world’s chosen environment for informa- Sales Information Center at (800) 426- tion work, providing the programs, servers, 9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft and services that help you succeed by Canada Information Centre at (877) 568- transforming information into impact. 2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing For more information about the Microsoft can reach Microsoft text telephone Office system, go to: (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. www.microsoft.com/office Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Southern Union Company products and services, call (713) 989-2000 or visit the Web site at: www.sug.com

Software and Services Hardware  Microsoft Office  HP ProLiant DL380 G5 − Microsoft Office SharePoint Server  HP ProLiant DL585 G2 2007  HP ProLiant BL25p G1 − Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 − Microsoft Office Professional 2007  Technologies − Active Directory

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published August 2009