Microsoft Office 2010Partner Solution Case Study

Office 2010 Custom Solutions Fuel IT Firm’s Growth Tapping Into Long Tail of SMBs

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: IT Services

Partner ProfileGrid Logic is a small Minneapolis-based company that provides a breadth of customized Microsoft Office-based development solutions and budgeting/forecasting software.

Business SituationAs small SMBs experience growth, they require new and different models to function efficiently. Grid Logic provides individualized solutions to help SMBs grow.

SolutionGrid Logic — through its Logic + Budgeting software and breadth of customized development solutions —helps SMBs automate Microsoft Office-based tasks that would otherwise occupy hours of employee time, or necessitate hiring additional staff.

Benefits User-Friendly Customized to Customers’ Needs Enhanced Revenue

“Office has always fit well because it is so well-geared to solving so many different problems without requiring big changes in the technology infrastructure of my clients.”

Steve Hansen, President, Grid Logic

Grid Logic was founded in 1998 by Steve Hansen, a corporate financial analyst with an interest in computers and programming. Hansen was frustrated with the lack of automated analytical tools at his disposal, and founded Grid Logic to fill that void with customized Microsoft Office-based solutions. Grid Logic has helped SMB customers solve a broad range of problems by leveraging Microsoft Office technologies. More than half of Grid Logic’s business comes from Office-related solutions and services. This year, its Office products are set to show a 114 percent growth over last year, and the company is on track to grow another 47 percent in 2011.

SituationIn 1998, after completing his MBA and spending several years as a corporate financial analyst, Steve Hansen was frustrated — and saw an opportunity. “Looking back, I was very naïve. I assumed that with all the resources of a big corporation, I’d have all these tools to help me do my job.” He soon realized that he had to crunch and analyze numbers without any good tools.

“It felt like I spent all my days just copying and pasting and adding numbers, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, there’s got to be a better way.’”

Hansen got to work, applying his lifelong interest in computer programming to automate the tedious number-crunching that was needlessly taking up valuable work hours. He founded Grid Logic to expand his programming solutions into the market and help other companies, particularly SMBs, struggling with the same problems.

He added: “One advantage of working with SMBs is that lots of times those SMBs are going through big growing pains. You know, you start off small, and you can do things inefficiently and get away with them because you just don’t have the workload. But as you get bigger, those old ways don’t work anymore. And so a lot of SMBs are turning to automation to scale up and handle bigger quantities of work without necessarily adding additional staff.”

Leveraging Microsoft’s TechnologiesGrid Logic currently has five employees, and they address many different customer needs from enhanced collaboration to increased reporting capabilities. Hansen found that Microsoft Office-based solutions provided a convenient breadth of capabilities. “We’re not always solving the same problems with our customers,” Hansen said. “We’re getting a wide range of problems. By leveraging Office’s capabilities, we’re not starting from scratch. If we see a problem and we know this is something that Word could solve pretty easily with a little bit of automation, we leverage Word. If it’s a data management problem, then we can leverage Access. So from that perspective, it’s all developing on top of Office. It makes it feel like it’s a game of connect-the-dots. We’re just adding a little bit of programming on top of Office and letting Office do its work.”

Microsoft Office’s huge pre-installed base among customers is a boon for Grid Logic. Hansen said: “We know that we can take advantage of Office’s capabilities without burdening our customers with additional software requirements.

Hansen added: “Office, for me, has always fit well because it is so well-geared to solving so many different business problems without requiring big changes in the technology infrastructure of my clients. So often we’re working with the end users instead of the IT department of a company. We don’t always have the power to go in there and dictate changes in their technology infrastructure.”

SolutionFocusing on Customer Solutions for GrowthGrid Logic’s two main Office-based revenue streams are its Logic + Budgeting product and its customized development solutions.

About 60 percent of Grid Logic’s total business comes from Microsoft Office-based services. Of that, broad custom development accounts for 45 percent, and the rest from its Logic + Budgeting solution.

Logic + Budgeting is a budgeting and forecasting software — typically a five to 10-seat solution that allows growing companies to manage, consolidate, analyze, and report on multiple sets of data at once. Hansen explained: “As these small SMBs get bigger, all of a sudden they’ve got maybe a dozen different departments with a dozen different managers sending some comptroller all of these budgets. And that comptroller has to then set up some kind of system to consolidate and analyze all of those spreadsheets. Our product automates that whole process so that you can easily run multiple iterations instead of a one-day event just to do one iteration. You can import the spreadsheets and in five minutes you’ve got all the reports that you need. And it can also be in real time.”

Although the solution typically targets smaller SMBs, it has been successfully deployed at companies up to 750 seats in size.

Grid Logic’s other main revenue stream is custom solution development. The firm builds on Microsoft Office to address similar issues of growth involving Human Resources, project management, financial management, customer service, production, and other key business needs.

Many companies are also investing in Business Intelligence systems, noted Hansen. “That’s another thing we do, and for which Office is great. It’s a great way to discover new areas of growth, or reduce costs by optimizing operations.”

Success with SolutionsGrid Logic recently provided a 10-seat solution to a small Ford dealership, which needed help calculating commissions. With commissions split among multiple sales and finance employees, it was inefficient for one person to juggle and calculate all that information on each sale. Grid Logic was able to automate a quick solution that calculated all their commissions and produced sales reports within the dealership’s existing Microsoft Office platform.

On the larger end of the spectrum, Grid Logic created a custom solution for an international environmental consulting firm seeking to globally brand their environmental impact assessment reports. Having recently expanded through global acquisition, the firm wanted to ensure that all their reports — from Malaysia to London — were uniform. Grid Logic developed a solution within Microsoft Word, which handled the complex formatting requirements of these environmental impact assessment reports (anywhere from 12 to 200 pages), and complied with company branding efforts at the same time.

“By leveraging Office’s capabilities, we’re not starting from scratch. If we see a problem and we know this is something that Word could solve pretty easily with a little bit of automation, we leverage Word. If it’s a data management problem, then we can leverage Access.”

Steve Hansen, President, Grid Logic

“Many companies are starting to invest in business intelligence systems. That’s another thing we do, and for which Office is great. It’s a great way to discover new areas of growth, or reduce costs by optimizing operations.”

Steve Hansen, President, Grid Logic

Office 2010 Enhances BI SolutionsHansen sees big things coming with Microsoft Office 2010. He expects Excel’s new PowerPivot add-in to enhance Grid Logic’s previous Business Intelligence model. He said: “By using PowerPivot, we’re going to be able to achieve the same result in a much lower amount of time. So for our customers with Office 2010, we’ll be able to build their solutions at a lower cost and help us increase our volume as we can build on those successes.”

A lot of SMBs are scared off by existing Business Intelligence tools, said Devon Barnes, a Grid Logic Account Manager and Project Manager. He wants to show customers the power of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 to generate their own BI tools such as graphic reports and real-time reports. “It’ll be interesting to show them that wow, they can get true BI with the toolsthey already have on their desktop.”

Hansen is extremely enthusiastic about Office 2010’s web-based capabilities, particularly in terms of database management. Using Access Services, he plans to build web-enabled databases, which can then be accessed through a browser anywhere in the world. “It’s going to give us better management capabilities on those databases,” he explained, ”and so we can build and manage them in a way where we don’t necessarily have to go on-site with our customer to make those changes. A key selling point of Office 2010 is to be able to get a web application experience but still build it using the ease and simplicity of Office.”

BenefitsEasy-to-Build, User-Friendly SolutionsHansen said: “Microsoft Office makes it too easy for us to build these solutions and we know with great confidence that they can be implemented in our customers’ environment. It’s such a versatile tool that we can use practically anywhere, so we just keep going back to it.

Growing Bottom LineThis year, Grid Logic is on pace to have a revenue of US$330,000 from Office-related services and products — a 114 percent growth over the past year. In addition, the firm is set to earn a total revenue of US$550,000 in 2010.

Next year, the company expects to see another 47 percent growth over the past year’s growth.

Barnes sees the current economic situation as an opportunity, and Microsoft Office as the perfect tool to take advantage of it.

He said: “It’s great timing that the industry seems to be coming out of a recession at the same time that Microsoft is launching a whole slew of new products — Office 2010, SharePoint 2010. So from a sales standpoint, it’s a great time to say, ‘Hey look, you’ve been sitting stagnant for a couple years, you’ve been dealing with the downsizing and all the pain that comes with it, and by the way, here’s some new sets of tools that may be able to really get the bang for your buck and start driving your business again.’”

Microsoft Office 2010Microsoft Office 2010 gives your people powerful, timesaving tools to do their best work from more places. With new capabilities and insightful updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, Office 2010 offers the complete package — with familiar, intuitive tools. Now you can

express ideas, solve problems, connect with people, and create amazing results — in the office, at home, or on the go. For more information about Microsoft Office, go to: www.office.com

Software and Services Microsoft Office 2010

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

Document published 12/6/10

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For more information about Grid Logic products and services, call +1 612 337 9099 or visit the Web site at: www.gridlogic.com