SharePoint Tip of the Month

Bringing Products to Market More Efficiently with SharePoint

When a company completes R&D, there are many complex business processes that must occur before the finished product can be brought to market. With time to market being such a critical advantage in a competitive environment, it is all the more imperative that these complex business processes be streamlined and handled as efficiently as possible.

Every new product provides risks to a company. State, federal, national, and international regulations present risks of non-compliance. New products that are not sufficiently tested present other legal risks. So many people and so many departments need to be a part of the approval process, including, in the case of multinational organizations, people located all over the world. So when a company has grown substantially through mergers and acquisitions, how can they ensure that all of the right departments and managers are involved in the process?

Language barriers and different standards of measurement provide additional obstacles. In this case, how can they put the necessary safeguards in place to ensure that not only all of the right information is gathered, but that it is presented in meaningful ways in different countries?

The challenges outlined above are just a sampling of those that must be faced when a company is bringing a new product to market. SharePoint, with its forms capability, workflow foundation, and task and document management features, provides a platform for a comprehensive business solution that addresses the business challenge described herein.

The SharePoint solution that meets these needs consists of the following:

• Custom forms to support collection of required regulatory information and supporting documentation for a material
• Custom SharePoint workflows to collect approvals of applicable managers and departments. These approval requests are routed based on material type finished good status such that the system only involves approvers necessary to support the action.
• Valid values for applicable fields sourced from the ERP system to ensure accuracy and completeness of data
• Custom forms to collect the required data to support minor and major data updates in the ERP system, and creation of SharePoint tasks that display filtered views of the material data needed to support the ERP system entry/update activity as well as allow tracking to ensure completion
• Dashboards and views that readily show the status of materials in the process and offer task management and monitoring capabilities
• Functionality to search for material records and view their supporting documentation, versioning that allows for an approved public record to exist while a pending draft change is being routed for approval for a given material, and the ability to create a new material using an existing approved material as a starting point
• Features to support global deployment, including configuration to allow for country differences such as designation of local decimal and thousand separators conventions and date/time formatting as well as workflow participant look ups based on region, chemistry/product line, sales organization-distribution channel, and role