Moss Adams

Productivity means profitability

With 1300 employees and 180 partners, Moss Adams is the 11th largest accounting firm in the United States. They work primarily with business owners and private companies in their 17 West Coast offices. In short, Moss Adams has a lot going on in multiple places at one time. While looking for a good collaboration solution, they stumbled across Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, which was included with their Microsoft Office 2003 licenses. Their grassroots solution began with their existing licenses, and continued with development assistance from Resolute’s team of SharePoint professionals, who helped them identify how they could best leverage the powerful features of SharePoint.

The Challenge

Before an effective collaboration solution could be put in place, the natural business barriers for Moss Adams had to be clearly identified. These barriers were painfully clear: travel costs and employee downtime were skyrocketing as a result of geographically-dispersed offices and centers of expertise.

Office Locations Spanning the West Coast

Moss Adams has 17 office locations spanning the entire West Coast of the United States. They have offices as far north as Bellingham, Washington, and as far south as San Diego, California. Before implementing SharePoint as an effective collaboration solution, working with employees in another office often meant expensive travel. Not only was Moss Adams struggling with the challenges of working with geographically-dispersed offices, they were also traveling to client sites. “We want to keep the costs down for our clients, and travel offers little value to our clients. Plus it’s very time-consuming for us and hard on our people,” said Karen Kenyon, the Marketing executive with Moss Adams who spearheaded their collaboration solution.

Centers of Expertise at Separate Offices

Geographic dispersal was also challenging because the centers of expertise within Moss Adams were spread throughout their offices. Each office serves a select group of industries, so experts for each local industry are centralized to the appropriate offices. When working with clients outside of the base in a particular location, teams work directly with experts in offices 25 miles away, or even whole states away. According to Kenyon, “while we feel we can deliver the best people to do the work, by drawing on experts from all over the West Coast, sometimes we’ll lose efficiency in the work by doing just that, or by not having everyone in the same room, hearing the same thing at the same time.”

The Solution

Moss Adams knew all too well what their collaboration challenges were. “There’s a huge advantage to being able to collaborate with our different teams,” said Kenyon, “instead of constantly trying to email stuff around, or worse, drag people out of their offices and into different locations for an extensive period of time to do a large engagement.” They had identified SharePoint as the tool to use in solving their challenges, but needed help implementing SharePoint to effectively meet their needs.

Secure Document Collaboration

Kenyon says it best: “without SharePoint, it’s very difficult for me to say, ‘Hey, let’s work on this document together now.’ I could email it around to you, but that gets messy quickly. You don’t even know that until you have a collaboration tool. You think the email is the best thing since sliced bread until you get the next thing.”

Resolute helped Moss Adams identify how SharePoint could help them securely collaborate on documents more effectively and efficiently. “One of the greatest challenges is collaborating on files: large spreadsheets and other tools of the accounting trade that are unwieldy to email,” said Kenyon. Client information must be kept secure, and with the low level of safety in collaborating through e-mail, Moss Adams needed a more secure solution. SharePoint provided this security by enabling them to store documents on an internal server, accessible by only those employees and clients who were appropriately authenticated.

Beyond security, Moss Adams needed a document collaboration solution that allowed for many people in many locations to modify a single document. They were running into issues with several versions of a single document existing throughout their network. “We found that we would lose efficiency on the engagements, and therefore, lose money,” said Kenyon. “Because we can’t work on a file together very well doesn’t mean our clients should have to pay for it.” With Resolute’s help, Moss Adams is now using SharePoint to enable team members in several different offices to work collaboratively on a single version of a document. According to Kenyon, “because SharePoint document libraries have check-in, check-out, edit directly in Word, and versioning history and control, it makes it a very good place for us to work on documents.”

Automated Proposal Generation

Through the process of reviewing the features of SharePoint with Moss Adams, Resolute helped to identify proposal generation as another area in which automation could help simplify their business. “We did an analysis of our proposal success across the firm and found on average that we were winning less than 30% of our proposals,” said Kenyon. “We are a rapidly growing firm; therefore, we are adding new offices niches, partners, and employees all the time. Frankly, we found out that most people’s M.O. was to take the last proposal they did, slap in a find and replace, do a little editing and hope it wasn’t too far off.”

The obvious answer to this process was to create a template for team members to use when writing new proposals. “Within a week of playing around with SharePoint,” said Kenyon, “I realized that this was an ideal delivery platform for not only people to come to a central place and find those templates, but also to create their own spaces to collaborate with others across the firm.”

Resolute helped Moss Adams leverage SharePoint and Microsoft InfoPath as a solution to their template needs. “Because the templates are designed as a skeleton,” said Kenyon, “we can populate SharePoint document libraries with supplemental information that our proposal coordinators and the sales team leaders can pick and choose from based on the information. It really allows them to have a considerably more customized proposal without having to draft things from the beginning.”