Improving Quality Management Software for a Global Lead Producer and Recycler with $3 Billion in Revenue

Customer

The Customer is an international company that specializes in lead production and recycling. The company runs 20+ facilities across the United States, Europe, and Africa and produces more than 800,000 tons of lead and lead alloys annually, reaching nearly $3 billion in revenue. With 3,000+ headcount, the company also provides consulting services on lead production and metalworking.

Challenge

The Customer is able to ensure effective production processes by relying on the established policies and procedures that should be strictly followed by all employees. For this mission, the Customer adopted a SharePoint-based quality management system to store, use and update their corporate policies and documented procedures, which cover production processes at each facility. To optimize and extend the functionality of the existing solution, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft’s SharePoint team, whose expertise extends to more than 9 years in SharePoint development and consulting. The team had to address several challenges:

• Spread the quality management functionality throughout all the sites in the Customer’s site collection.
• Enable automatic notifications to keep employees aware of all the modifications made to policies and procedures.
• Provide a separate collaboration space for employees to share confidential documents related to particular production processes.
• Create SharePoint-based surveys to test employees’ knowledge of relevant policies and procedures.

Solution

Following the Customer’s requirements, SharePoint developers implemented the dedicated functionality to address the challenges set to them.

Initially, the Customer used a SharePoint site collection that included independent sites for the company’s different branches. ScienceSoft’s team brought the quality management functionality to every site, also filling them with relevant documents. The developers also provided custom acknowledgment features to let managers control if employees read the required policies and are aware of all the production details.

Using SharePoint event receivers, the team enabled automatic notifications to inform employees when a policy or a procedure is modified, or a new document is added to the system.

After that, ScienceSoft created separate collaboration spaces as a part of the quality management system. Accessing such a space, employees with relevant permissions are now able to share and collaborate on confidential documents related to particular production processes.

Finally, the project team adjusted custom survey forms designed to check the staff’s knowledge of the corporate code of practice. Previously these forms were stored as separate spreadsheets and were distributed among employees manually. Now HR managers can offer relevant competency surveys to employees according to their specialization within the quality management system. The answers are processed automatically and delivered to a responsible HR manager, who then assesses the results and employees’ readiness to fulfill production tasks. 

Results

ScienceSoft successfully tuned the Customer’s quality management system and provided all the required features to make the system more effective. The provided functionality allows the company to make crucial policies accessible across all its branches. At the same time, distributed permissions guarantee that confidential documents are available only for authorized users. The system also enables HR managers to control employees’ policy knowledge and to carry out assessment surveys, thus ensuring a stable working process compliant with the company’s internal regulations.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Workflows, C#, JavaScript.