Development of a Business Information System using SharePoint

Company Description

Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) is the world’s leading provider of enterprise market information solutions and services, empowering its clients to grow their business profitably in a complex marketplace. The company’s portfolio of services, solutions, and technology enable leading retailers and their suppliers around the globe to see what they are missing, act faster with greater confidence and win at the shelf. Ninety-five percent of the FORTUNE Global 500 in CPG and retail leverage IRI to power their business.

Project Description

Corporate Business Information Systems (CBIS) group of IRI uses CBIS Task System, to key in and track the progress of requests for new development, maintenance and general support for more than a dozen different information systems in the corporate network.

The CBIS group used to manually key in the requests received from different departments. This was a very time consuming and error prone process to monitor and manage requests. This problem was compounded further with the users being located at different sites.

CBIS turned to Trigent to develop an online system to manage the trouble tickets, enhancements, bug fixes raised by users and user groups.

Challenges

CBIS wanted a system that could not only resolve the management of requests in an efficient manner but also facilitate a secure way to track the progress of requests. Major capabilities the system needed to support included.

• Allow CBIS' internal customers the ability to view the status of projects completed, in progress, or yet to be started by CBIS.
• Automate the manual process of customers requesting work from CBIS.
• Enable users remotely located in disparate geographic locations to post, review progress of projects.
• Ensure security through role based authorization and authentications

Key Benefits

By augmenting its development resources with Trigent's offshore team CBIS improved the productivity of its online request tracking system. Some of the benefits realized by CBIS include-

• Enhanced management of customer issues through an efficient trouble ticket entry and geographical trouble ticket tracking
• Dynamic generation of summary and reports into Office documents programmatically (i.e. Word, Excel).
• Seamless integration into the existing SharePoint corporate extranet portal
• Significantly improved time and cost savings resulting from a seamless system.