Grant Thornton Tallies Big Savings with Connected

Grant Thornton International is the sixth largest accounting firm in the world with $1.6 billion in annual revenues, 612 offices and 20,000 employees worldwide. The growing, 75-year-old, Chicago-based financial power-house now encompasses a network of 44 offices, 3,000 consultants, and support staff in the U.S. alone. In a move to standardize and streamline network operations, Grant Thornton rebuilt its entire U.S. computing infrastructure down to the desktop several years ago. The driving force was the need for protection of the firm’s knowledge capital. Therefore, the built-in systems redundancy is nothing short of massive, with the firm’s mirrored regional servers acting as full redundancy for one another. For example, in the event of failure, the Dallas and New York servers fall back to each other. Chicago and Los Angeles are similarly paired.
“Connected’s application enabled us to convert a fragmented and complex environment to a highly standardized, efficient and secure network for 3,000 people over an 18-month period,” said Dave Johnson, director of technology. “The impact has been incredibly significant, with a hundredfold improvement in efficiency, cost reduction, standardization and mean time failure reduction.”

The Worrisome Gap: Mobile Consultants
The gaping chasm in this plan? Mobility.
Half of Grant Thornton’s 3,000-strong workforce is traveling consultants who are dependant on PC uptime, and whose notebooks are crammed with critical data. Historically, the notebooks were unsupportable from the road, and typically weren’t backed up; yet their loss could — and did — threaten lucrative sales.

“A couple of years ago, three computers with extensive data from a client audit were lost in transit from Mexico and, ironically ended up in a competitor’s possession,” he said. “We had to go back to the client, apologize, and recreate all of the lost efforts. With Connected, we would have been able to recover the entire PC within four hours, including all data without duplicating all the work or suffering an embarrassment.”

To dispel the company’s false sense of confidence about data protection, Grant Thornton asked three Latin American subsidiaries, which all claimed allegiance to a consistent disaster recovery policy, to bring their most recent backup disks to a meeting.

“The most recent disk was three weeks old,” he said. “The point was made. Companies are kidding themselves when they think users will take initiative to protect their systems. They just don’t do it. We needed a solution that delivered automated self-healing and eliminated the need for user participation in any disaster recovery process.”

Solutions: Scarce and Limited
Recognizing the problem existed was not difficult. But finding a solution was quite another matter. Johnson searched the market for about a year, starting in 1998, but could find nothing with Connected’s ability to automatically heal any PC problem, and protect data remotely.

According to Johnson, the Connected implementation was completed in the fall of 1999 and was deployed over two months throughout North America. Grant Thornton used Microsoft SMS to distribute the client software on each PC. The software was installed on every PC with no user input required. Now the systems operate and transmit automatically every day when the consultants dial in for email and with their daily time and expense reports.

The Payoff: Cost Savings and Hundreds of Recoveries
The results? Within the past year, support costs are down and Grant Thornton has been able to recover from about 300 notebooks which had been lost, stolen or damaged, he said.

“Our loss rate was about 10 percent, which is fairly typical for the industry,” Johnson said. “But with Connected TLM, we were able to recover all of this output. In addition, user productivity has been greatly increased since PC downtime is virtually eliminated. How can you put a value on that? More important than the replacement cost of the equipment is our customer relationships and our ability to meet their expectations with delivery of goods and services.” Some mishaps are memorable. Like the consultant who laid his notebook on the driveway and then proceeded to drive over it. “He converted his computer into a bag of parts,” Johnson recalled. “But we were able to recover the entire PC completely.”

Other problems are merely aggravating, like the rash of thefts that plagued the Chicago headquarters. During one three-week period, the office was hit by several notebook thefts, including one belonging to a director who walked into his office and found everything “completely gone,” Johnson said. But because of Connected, IT was able to completely restore his PC on a new machine.

A Win for PC Data Protection
Connected also has been a big win for PC Data Protection. Without the time-consuming task of hand-restoring failed equipment, the “aggressively sized” IT staff, one IT employee per 80 users, is able to fulfill its mission of PC support, Johnson said.
“We’ve had hundreds of instances where users have system problems, application failures or overwritten their data,” he said. “The self-healing ability and ability of users to restore their own data positively impacts IT support by reducing workload and enabling us to maintain lean IT staffing levels.

“Without Connected, we would have to add more technicians,” he said.
The most significant benefit to Grant Thornton, though, is ensuring the integrity and timeliness of its work product and in assuring that the firm can meet clients’ expectations, Johnson added. “You can win the battle and lose the war if reports and recommendations are late due to PC problems or missing data,” he said.

Customer Support: Helpful, Open
Connected also has backed up its products with strong customer support, according to Richard Carlyle, Grant Thornton’s regional technical administrator in Dallas.
“Our relationship has been excellent from the beginning of the implementation cycle,” Carlyle said. “They are very open and flexible in helping us modify the software to meet our needs, instead of saying, ‘here it is and here’s how you do it.’”

For example, during the rollout, Connected support staff performed executed special logistics involved in assigning mobile users to one of four regional servers, he said.
“The entire Connected team is incredibly responsive and does whatever it takes to resolve customer questions in the most timely manner,” Carlyle said.