Global Conglomerate SharePoint Commercial Real Estate Management Portal

Challenge

Historically, this company had produced monthly activity reports using a tedious manual process that involved tracking down status and information for hundreds of projects around the globe. Data management and tracking processes were well defined and routinely followed. However, document templates for various deliverables changed periodically, making it difficult to ensure employees were all using the same, fully updated versions of documents.

Solution

After a detailed requirements analysis, Abel Solutions designed and implemented a solution comprised of InfoPath to complete a variety of forms, SharePoint workflows for routing documents to the appropriate parties for approval, and custom web parts to aggregate content and allow them to track activity across all projects.

At the core of the solution are SharePoint sites for every project. Sites consist of a series of SharePoint lists and libraries to manage project documents, tasks and progress notes. A custom web part displays high-level project information for users, while another custom web part displays a checklist of standard documents and forms to complete.

As forms and various stages of the company’s business process are completed, they are routed to senior managers for approval using SharePoint workflows. The SharePoint workflows send emails to the appropriate people to let them know an item has been assigned. If approval tasks remain incomplete, they also send follow-up emails after a pre-determined period. Finally, they add tasks to the SharePoint sites to allow others to monitor the status of the approval.

Results

The SharePoint sites give project team members a single location where they can find all project-based information. Conversion of project forms to electronic format in InfoPath ensures employees always have the latest versions of forms and that no forms are submitted with invalid or missing information. Key metrics used for various management reports are extracted electronically from completed InfoPath forms, guaranteeing the integrity of reports. These metrics are structured, real-time, into Task Tracking Reports, filterable Executive Summary Reports and Activity Reports to give senior managers an accurate overview of progress and potential roadblocks.