Global Consumer Products Company SharePoint Quality Control Management System

Challenge

Prior to contracting with Abel Solutions, change requests to quality documents involved a cumbersome process that increased the potential for error. For all change requests, one system accepted and tracked the change request itself, while another system archived the affected document. The requestor actually made two change requests – one to the tracking system and one to the document management application. This would result in two parallel but separate workflows, causing confusion and problems that had to be carefully managed. Abel Solutions’ challenge was to merge these disparate functions and operating environments into a reliable, user-friendly system by which change requests could be initiated, managed and implemented.

Solution

Abel Solutions unified the document management and workflow systems on a single SharePoint site. Users submit a change request and it is automatically and electronically routed to the appropriate department. The department assigns it to the appropriate interface person for that specific document, and they can evaluate and/or modify the changes directly without the need for additional requests. SharePoint handles all notifications and routing at every step of the process.

Results

In additional to streamlining the change request process for users, the new SharePoint system has enhanced and encouraged collaboration among participants, facilitating interaction and expediting the change process. Throughout the life of the change request, participants can check in and out of the documents to accept, reject, question or otherwise participate in the change approval process without having to find the document in the workflow – or even know at what point it is. When a change request is ready for review, involved parties receive notification of a discussion library where they can collaborate about the change. After approval, the revised document is moved to the published library, from which it flows to the production site. At any time, administrators can review and evaluate open change requests to determine where bottlenecks are occurring.