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Palaiseau, September 1st, 2005

W4 helps Giraud International to streamline processes and improve customer service

W4, a leading provider of Business Process Management solutions (BPM), today announced that Giraud International, a leading European transport organizer and operator, has selected W4 for SPS to manage its transport quotations at a European level.

With a presence in 13 countries, Giraud International is widely recognized as one of the largest companies in the Pan-European road transport sector. It has 3,200 employees and a fleet consisting of 2,400 motor vehicles and 3,000 trailers.

Faced with an increasingly competitive and global marketplace and with new developments in standards and changing customers’ needs, Giraud International is constantly adapting its IT system to be quicker, more reliable and more efficient.

The company made the decision to create a single and integrated system linking geographical points through harmonized procedures in order to optimize resources and provide a more coordinated response to customers across Europe. In this way Giraud International aims to reinforce its pan-European operational strategy by placing the customer at the heart of its processes.

Back in 2004 the group decided to standardize and harmonize its applications within the framework of a single portal enabling better centralization and visibility of information.

This also offered a single-point of contact for customers and optimized the customer service operations, as well as improving communications between back-office applications (ERP) and front-office sales and marketing applications.

In this context Giraud International has selected W4 for SPS to optimize and enhance the functionalities of its Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server with new Business Process Management capabilities. This follows a successful pilot project for managing quotations which began in October 2004.

The aim was to integrate a BPM tool into the overall intranet and extranet architecture in order to: improve the reliability and standardization of processes, improve communications between the various departments given the complex nature of the organization and finally to reduce development, deployment and administration costs.

“The choice of W4 was a natural one” explained Pierre-Alain Mouy, the project leader and IT Director at Giraud International. “The W4 for SPS solution is open and was easy to integrate into our enterprise infrastructure enabling us to significantly enhance collaboration within the company.”

The transport quotations project

Giraud International now manages all transport quotations and creation of new accounts via its portal. A request for a quotation is generated via Microsoft CRM, which is then transmitted to W4 via the Web Services. Attachments are automatically archived in Sharepoint libraries. A pool of employees receives the requests and qualifies them for approval. Once they have been approved, W4 transmits the final quote back to MS CRM. In this way, W4 serves as a unique link between the company’s different software applications and facilitates communications between the different users by bringing together information from across the organization to a single point.

Today, nearly 125 employees at Giraud are using W4 for SPS

The project was successfully rolled out in just four months resulting in complete automation of the quotations process and a significant improvement in service quality.

By 2006 it is planned that more than 1000 employees will be using W4 for SPS.