Microsoft Visual Studio .NETCustomer Solution Case Study

Connected Systems Accelerate Solution Delivery, Reduce IT Costs by

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Construction

Customer ProfileParsippany, New Jersey–based Skanska USA Building is the third largest construction company in the United States, with approximately 4,100 employees.

Business SituationSkanska needed to integrate its core business applications and make data available to users when working offline.

SolutionSkanska implemented a service-oriented architecture that extends the data in its many business systems for both online and offline access through a single, enterprise-wide portal.

Benefits Improved employee productivity Better access to information Improved collaboration Accelerated time-to-market and

return on investment 40 percent reduction in annual IT

costs

“Executive management was excited by a 40 percent reduction in IT costs, and even more excited about the new business capabilities that we can deliver.”Chris Stockley, Chief Information Officer, Skanska USA Building

After building contractor Skanska USA Building merged its numerous wholly owned subsidiaries into a single company operating under the Skanska brand, it still had more than a dozen core business applications. Using a service-oriented architecture, the company is making the information in those applications available to employees, customers, and partners through an enterprisewide portal. Skanska’s use of Microsoft® software to connect people, systems, and processes has yielded several benefits including improved collaboration and access to information, 40 percent reduction in IT costs, and rapid time-to-market and return on investment for new IT projects. Just as important, the company’s connected environment is helping bring about a change in culture, enabling people to work more closely together toward a common set of performance goals.

SituationSkanska USA Building, a business unit of Sweden-based Skanska AB, is a leading provider of construction services. Headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey, the company is the third largest contractor in the United States. Skanska USA Building has approximately 4,100 employees and generates approximately U.S.$4 billion in annual revenues.

In 2003, Skanska USA merged its numerous wholly owned subsidiaries across the United States into a single company. As part of the effort, the company consolidated more than 100 applications to just over a dozen. Although the 10-month project significantly reduced IT costs, the company’s IT group still faced a challenge common to most large companies.

“We still had more than a dozen core systems and needed a way to integrate them quickly and economically,” says Chris Stockley, Chief Information Officer for Skanska USA Building. “We prefer to buy instead of build, such as we’ve done with our core business systems, but there are many business-specific needs that third-party applications can’t meet. For those, we need to be able to combine the data in our core systems and extend it to users through custom solutions that support specific business processes.”

Skanska also needed a way to make those custom solutions accessible to

its distributed work force, 75 percent of which work at job locations that may not always have Internet access. “We could have 2,000 active job sites at any one time, 30 of which move each day,” says Stockley. “Not only do we need connected IT solutions, but we also need a way for people to make use of them even when connectivity isn’t readily available.”

SolutionSkanska USA Building implemented a flexible, connected solution platform through the use of Microsoft® .NET–connected software. With that foundation, the company is rapidly delivering new solutions that provide information to the people who need it in the form that makes it most useful. Employees can collaborate more closely with customers and work more productively, and management is able to better monitor company performance and make business decisions.

In building its connected solution platform and new solutions, Skanska used:

Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, which provides a set of infrastructure services on which all other solution components rely.

Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004, which facilitates integration among core business systems and orchestrates movement of data in

“With Microsoft software, we can achieve a far greater level of software reuse, instead of building each new solution from scratch.”Chris Stockley, Chief Information Officer, Skanska USA Building

and out of those systems in support of tailored, user-centric solutions.

Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, including its Reporting Services and Analysis Services features, which Skanska uses to flexibly and cost-effectively deliver business intelligence across the enterprise.

Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, which provides tools that facilitate collaboration and a single launching point for enterprise applications and reports.

Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 information-gathering program, which helps Skanska rapidly deploy new end-user applications that work in both online and offline modes.

Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system and the .NET Framework, which provide an integrated development environment and unified programming model for building Web sites, Web services, and smart client applications.

“With Microsoft software, we can achieve a far greater level of software reuse, instead of building each new solution from scratch,” says Stockley. “The Windows® [operating system] platform gives us a flexible tool set for integration and business process automation, a user interface for the rapid development of new user-centric solutions, and a common reporting and business intelligence

environment that can service the entire enterprise.”

Service-Oriented ArchitectureAt the core of the Skanska USA Building connected enterprise is a service-oriented architecture, in which the company’s core business applications are exposed through Web services—application components that can be accessed programmatically using standard Web protocols. Business applications that are exposed in that way include:

JD Edwards for enterprise resource planning and financials.

Prolog for project management and accounting.

Timberline for estimating and other preconstruction activities.

SalesLogix for customer relationship management.

Remedy for IT help desk.

Integration and business process automation are handled by BizTalk Server 2004, which coordinates movement of data in and out of back-end systems in support of higher-level business processes—again exposed for reuse as Web services. For example, when an employee updates his or her contact data on the company’s intranet site, the Web page passes that information to BizTalk Server through a Web service interface. BizTalk Server then determines which back-end systems

“Business content on our SharePoint Portal Server site outweighs IT content by a ratio of 10 to 1, which is evidence of its usefulness and user-friendliness.”Allen Emerick, Director of IT, Applications and Integration, Skanska USA Building

must be updated and calls the Web service interfaces into each of those systems.

Connected ApplicationsAfter building the Web services to integrate the common service layer with back-end systems and deploying BizTalk Server to orchestrate the interactions among those systems, Skanska USA Building began to reuse that common solution platform to deliver new business solutions. Three such solutions are the Project Status Report/ Construction Work in Progress (PSR/CWIP), Executive Scorecard, and Safety Report Card applications.

PSR/CWIP. With many different project management applications, it had been challenging for Skanska USA to gather and integrate information on the financial per-formance of construction projects. In the past, project status reports were completed in any of the different systems used by various locations, ranging from custom applications to Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet software. The data was forwarded and rekeyed into another Excel spreadsheet that also included information from the company’s JD Edwards financial system. It was a highly manual process that was prone to data entry errors, and there was no way to do trending or analysis on historical data.

With the new PSR/CWIP solution, project managers in the field are presented with an InfoPath 2003 form that resembles the spreadsheets used

in the past, except that the form is prepopulated with data from JD Edwards and the previous month’s PSR/CWIP report. The project manager reviews the numbers on the form, makes any necessary adjustments, attaches supporting documents, and saves the form. The PSR/CWIP solution was developed by a team of four people in six weeks and is used by 900 employees who work in project management and project accounting.

Executive Scorecard. After consolidating its businesses, Skanska USA needed to track business performance consistently across the organization. In the past, each subsidiary had its own set of financial measures for determining the health of the organization. Moving forward, it was critical that the entire company use the same indicators to monitor and drive performance—and that senior management be able to quickly identify problem areas and take corrective action.

Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, and the Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Business Scorecards, Skanska built a Web-based solution that provides a consistent set of performance measurements across the enterprise. Executives see color-coded graphical indicators that help them identify problem areas at a glance, and can intuitively drill down into the data behind those indicators to determine what actions must be taken. Developed in four weeks, the

“InfoPath has significantly reduced the effort required to collect and manage information. Reports that used to take weeks to produce now can be delivered in minutes.”Chris Stockley, Chief Information Officer, Skanska USA Building

Executive Scorecard is used by about 70 executives across the company.

Safety Report Card. In the past, the processes for collecting safety-related data on the job site varied from location to location, which prohibited Skanska from aggregating, com-paring, and performing trend analysis on that information. The company’s new Safety Report Card solution uses the same technologies and architecture as the PSR/CWIP solution, except that employees use Tablet PCs to access the InfoPath forms. The user retrieves a form while connected and saves it on the Tablet PC; after disconnecting, the user can complete the form in the field. Upon returning to a location with Internet access, the user saves the form back to the portal for processing. The solution was developed in a few weeks and is now used by roughly 150 employees to input and manage safety-related data (with reports made available to all employees).

Centralized ReportingIn addition to using a centralized reporting environment for its new connected solutions, such as those described above, Skanska USA has moved reporting and analytics for its core business applications outside those systems, again using a layered approach to facilitate software reuse and easily create reports that combine data from the different applications. Implemented using SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Analysis Services, the abstraction of reporting and analytics from core

business applications reduces report maintenance costs, facilitates delivery of all reports through a single common interface, and decreases the cost of replacing a core business application—along with the impact of such change on the organization.

“By abstracting reporting and analytics into a separate layer, we can develop and deliver reports independent of applications,” says Allen Emerick, Director of IT, Applications and Integration, for Skanska USA Building. “Reports are delivered in a consistent way and look the same regardless of where the data resides, and applications can be swapped out without having to rewrite the reports in a new environment. We just change data sources in the reporting layer, and we’re done. Also, with Reporting Services and Analysis Services, users can access reports and other business analytics through Microsoft Excel, enabling people to analyze, chart, or graph the data in a report in any way they desire.”

User-centric PortalsUsers access all reports and business applications through a companywide portal based on SharePoint Portal Server, which supports dedicated subportals for different categories of internal and external users.

Employee portal. The mySkanska.com employee portal, which provides online meeting workspaces and facilitates document collaboration, enables users to easily

find and share information across formal business lines or within informal working groups. The portal also provides a common launching point for all business applications and reports, ensuring that employees can easily find the tools and information they need.

Executive portal. The executive portal provides a workspace in which upper management can collaborate and share documents. It also provides a launching point for the Executive Scorecard solution.

Customer portal. Skanska recently began deploying dedicated portals for several of its customers. Through the portals, employees and customers can share documents, calendars, project photos, and contact lists. The portals also provide links to applications that are used jointly by employees and customers, such as Prolog for project management and Primavera Project Planner for scheduling. “Many application vendors provide portals, but they’re usually limited to that one application,” says Emerick. “With SharePoint Portal Server, we can deliver a user experience that spans all core business applications.”

Vendor portal. In the fourth quarter of 2005, Skanska USA plans to add a portal for subcontractor prequalification and qualification. The portal will be used to make vendors aware of new projects, allow them to submit bids for projects, and provide

a way for vendors to manage their own contact data.

“Business content on our SharePoint Portal Server site outweighs IT content by a ratio of 10 to 1, which is evidence of its usefulness and user-friendliness,” says Emerick. “With the portal solution that we have in place, each business group can manage its own user base and content.”

BenefitsThe Skanska USA connected enterprise has yielded several benefits including improved productivity, better access to information, and stronger collaboration. In addition, the company’s consolidation of its core business systems and adoption of a service-oriented architecture has resulted in a strong return on investment for new IT solutions and substantially lower IT costs.

Improved Employee ProductivitySolutions such as Project Status Report/ Construction Work in Progress and Safety Report Card have improved employee productivity by reducing the time spent collecting, aggregating, managing, and reporting information. The offline capabilities provided by Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 extend those solutions to areas where connectivity is not available, helping employees remain productive regardless of location.

“InfoPath has significantly reduced the effort required to collect and manage information,” says Stockley.

“Reports that used to take weeks to produce now can be delivered in minutes. We expect the PSR/CWIP solution alone to save $300,000 per year in timesavings alone, and perhaps another $200,000 per year through an improved ability to audit.”

Better Access to InformationAlthough harder to quantify, the company’s new connected applications also are delivering a strong return on investment through improved access to information across the enterprise. By enabling data to be collected in a consistent format, that information can be stored and analyzed more easily, helping optimize business performance.

“Solutions like PSR/CWIP are exactly what we need for construction project accounting,” says Leo Sinicin, Corporate Director, Project Accounting, for Skanska USA Building. “We’ve tried to build solutions like it in the past, but the technology wasn’t flexible and agile enough to meet the unique needs of our industry. Now we have a solution that meets our needs today and is flexible to adapt to the changes in our business. The solution has been invaluable to our accounting team in managing our project performance and profitability.”

Similarly, the Executive Scorecard solution provides improved access to information for Skanska upper management, who no longer must examine lengthy reports to determine where attention is needed. Instead, they can discern where the business

may not be performing as expected at a glance, and can easily get to the numbers behind the scorecard’s graphical indicators to determine which actions are required.

Improved CollaborationThe company’s portal solution helps employees collaborate with each other and with customers more effectively. A key beneficiary is the Skanska sales organization, which was one of the first groups in the company to adopt SharePoint team sites.

The sites greatly reduce the time spent searching for information, providing each sales group with a single place to find and share documents and files. Users no longer need to worry about mapped network drives or folders, which were arranged differently on a server in Boston than they were in Atlanta. Users rely on version history and document check-in/check-out capabilities provided by the portal to eliminate the confusion that can occur when a document is passed around through e-mail. After sites are created, business groups are empowered to manage them on their own.

“SharePoint Portal Server has become the standard for sales team collaboration,” says Emerick. “It streamlines information sharing and has allowed us to move on new business opportunities more efficiently than in the past. We can attribute several large wins—around

“The typical solution development cycle is measured in weeks instead of months.”Allen Emerick, Director of IT, Applications and Integration, Skanska USA Building

“SharePoint Portal Server has become the standard for sales team collaboration.… We can attribute several large wins—around $700 million in business—to our ability to collaborate more effectively and respond faster than the competition.”Allen Emerick, Director of IT,

$700 million in business—to our ability to collaborate more effectively and respond faster than the competition can.”

Rapid Return on InvestmentThrough its connected IT solution platform, Skanska can deliver new business solutions rapidly and cost-effectively, resulting in a strong return on investment for new solu-tions. The PSR/CWIP solution, which will deliver an expected $500,000 annual return, took six weeks to build at a cost of $65,000. Similarly, the Executive Scorecard was built for $50,000, and the first version of the Safety Report card solution cost roughly $5,000.

“We’re writing new applications faster than business units can deploy them,” says Emerick. “The typical solution development cycle is measured in weeks instead of months. Moreover, InfoPath forms can be created by junior-level developers, allowing more senior developers to work on broader-impact enhancements.”

$9 Million IT Cost SavingsAlong with new business capabilities, the company’s IT consolidation and standardization on Microsoft technology for all new projects has delivered significant bottom-line returns. In 2002, before the consolidation effort started, the company had a $22 million IT budget. As of June 2005, with an IT environment that is more agile and flexible than it was in the past, Skanska USA has an annual IT budget

of $13 million—a savings of more than 40 percent.

“I attribute a large part of the $9 million in IT cost savings that we’ve realized to our use of Microsoft technology,” says Stockley. “By standardizing on the Windows platform and using its capabilities to build a connected enterprise, we’re simply able to do more with less—not just keeping up with the demands of the business but proactively delivering new value. Executive management was excited by a 40 percent reduction in IT costs, and even more excited about the new business capabilities that we can deliver.”

According to Stockley, the intangible results of the IT group’s work over the past three years are just as impressive as the more concrete savings. “A connected enterprise helps support the behaviors we want, such as improved collaboration and the ability to keep everyone working to the same set of performance goals,” says Stockley. “It’s amazing how quick and agile Microsoft software has helped us become. We now can more easily accommodate business-driven change.”

The next section of this document describes the technical architecture of the solution and the challenges faced in building it.

“I attribute a large part of the $9 million in IT cost savings that we’ve realized to our use of Microsoft technology.”Chris Stockley, Chief Information Officer, Skanska USA Building

Architecture SynopsisThe architecture of the Skanska USA connected enterprise is shown in Figure 1.

Presentation LayerThe presentation layer is based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which provides a common launching point for access to information, documents, reports, and applications. Some tools on the portal, such as the one that employees use to manage their own contact information, are implemented as Web Parts that run within the SharePoint Portal Server environment. Other Web-based applications that are accessed through the portal are

hosted on a separate, dedicated Web server, with a Page Viewer Web Part used to embed the applications in the portal’s pages.Within the portal environment, Skanska makes extensive use of Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 forms for input and data capture. Here’s how the process works for the Project Status Report/Construction Work in Progress solution:

1.A project manager opens a new PSR/CWIP form by clicking a button on a portal page. An XML document that describes the form —stored in a SharePoint Portal Server form library—is downloaded to the user’s Web browser, which passes the document to InfoPath.

2.The user enters a job number or can do a lookup by clicking a button on the form, in which case InfoPath makes a Web service call to retrieve the desired information.

3.After a job number is entered, InfoPath makes two Web service calls to prepopulate the form with data from the JD Edwards system and the previous month’s PSR/CWIP report.

4.The project manager fills out the form, adjusts the prepopulated values as necessary, and attaches any supporting documentation. Validation properties built into the form check the data entered and ensure that all fields are populated.

Skanska USA Connected EnterprisePresentation Layer(SharePoint Portal Server 2003)

Web Parts

SQL Server 2000

Integration Layer

Prolog

Web PagesReporting Services Control

Business Logic and Workflow Layer(BizTalk Server 2004)

Reporting and Analysis Layer(SQL Server 2000)

Reporting Services

Business Process 1

Business Process 2

Business Process 3

Business Process 4

JD Edwards

Form Libraries

XML

TimberlineSalesLogix

Remedy

WebServices

CustomWeb Parts

Page Viewer

Web Part

Excel Web Part

Analysis Services

Figure 1. The Skanska USA Building connected enterprise is based on a service-oriented architecture.

5.When finished, the project manager clicks Save. InfoPath saves the XML document back to a second form library, and the portal sends an e-mail notification and link to the document to the project accounting team.

6.After a project accountant inspects and approves the numbers, he or she submits the XML document to a third form library.

7.Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 picks up the XML document from the form library, parses it, validates the data, and loads it into a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database for analysis and reporting.

If needed, users can disconnect after step 3 and complete step 4 while offline. Upon completing the form and returning to a location with connectivity, the process continues with step 5.

Business Logic and Workflow LayerThe business logic and workflow layer of the company’s service-oriented architecture is based on BizTalk Server 2004, which orchestrates interactions with back-end systems in support of various business processes. BizTalk Server both exposes orchestrations that define business processes as Web services and calls Web services from within those orchestrations—the latter being lower-level Web services that are used to expose the data in each back-end system. Data that passes through

the layer is validated within BizTalk Server pipelines.

“BizTalk Server is the ‘brain’ or ‘traffic cop’ of our architecture,” says Emerick. “We diagram a process using Microsoft Visio® drawing and diagramming software, which helps people on the business side get involved, and then import the Visio file into BizTalk Server to create the orchestrations.”

All code that runs within the business logic layer is written in the C# programming language using the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development system, and runs on the .NET Framework—an integral component of the Windows operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for building Web sites, Web services, and smart client applications. Skanska developers made extensive use of prebuilt application blocks provided by Microsoft as part of its patterns and practices guidance to accelerate solution development, including those for caching, configuration, data access, and exception logging.

“The application blocks provided by Microsoft were extremely useful,” says Emerick. “They saved us weeks of programming, virtually cutting our work in half.”

Integration LayerBizTalk Server accesses the company’s core business applications through a centralized integration layer, which exposes the data in each

application through one or more Web services. The Web services, in turn, rely on database calls to move information in and out of the various back-end systems. One exception is the JD Edwards system, which BizTalk Server accesses through an application-level connector.

Reporting and Analysis LayerThe reporting and analysis layer of the company’s solution platform is based on SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Analysis Services. Users click a link on the portal to access a report, and Reporting Services renders the reports as HTML for viewing in the user’s Web browser.

Built-in features of Reporting Services allow users to save reports as Adobe Acrobat files or import data into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. Online analytical processing (OLAP) functionality—used by the Executive Scorecard solution—is based on a relational OLAP design in which only aggregates and measures reside within the OLAP cubes, which point to data stored in a relational database. The OLAP cubes are accessed through Excel PivotTable® dynamic views or an Excel Web Part that runs within the SharePoint Portal Server environment.

Database LayerA SQL Server relational database stores documents saved on the portal and data collected with InfoPath forms. Skanska USA engaged Microsoft Services to help evaluate the company’s database environment after the consolidation of business

applications, and the two parties defined a new logical architecture. Skanska then deployed the physical architecture, which consists of two server computers in an active/active cluster, each server running two instances of SQL Server. One database instance supports the mySkanska.com portal and applications, and the other three instances support various line-of-business applications.

Technical ChallengesIn designing its solution platform, Skanska had to address two key business requirements: enabling employees to remain productive when working offline, and ensuring that the work done in that offline environment can be synchronized with the company’s corporate data stores from any location with an Internet connection—for example, a customer’s office—instead of requiring a complex virtual private network connection.

Skanska addressed the first requirement—offline productivity—through the use of InfoPath forms, which can be downloaded when connectivity is available, populated offline, and saved back to the portal when the user returns to a location with connectivity. To address the second requirement, Skanska chose Web services over direct database calls to facilitate connectivity between remote users and the company’s corporate data stores over any Internet connection.

Microsoft .NET FrameworkThe Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows component for building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.msdn.microsoft.com/netframework

Microsoft Visual Studio .NETMicrosoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio .NET:msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy

MSDN® Subscriptions:msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. 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 Skanska USA Building products and services, visit the Web site at:www.skanskausa.com

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, BizTalk, Excel, InfoPath, MSDN, PivotTable, SharePoint, Visio, Visual Studio, the Visual Studio logo, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published August 2005

Software and Services Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

Hardware One HP ProLiant DL380 one-

processor server (BizTalk Server)

One HP ProLiant DL380 two-processor server (SQL Server Analysis Services)

Two HP ProLiant DL580 two-processor servers (SQL Server relational database)

Two HP ProLiant BL20p G2 two-processor servers (SharePoint Portal Server—Web pages)

One HP ProLiant BL20p G2 two-processor server (SharePoint Portal Server—indexing)

Two HP ProLiant BL20p G2 two-processor servers (Web services and Web applications)

One Dell PowerEdge 2650 two-