Simple Project Management for Electronic Supplying Company
The Intertex Company has been supplying electronic components, materials and equipment for more than 8 years. For this period the amount of employees has increased dozens of times and more branches and offices have been open. By the 2007 year the company proceeded to development of fundamentally new business directions – contract production and technical consulting services. That is why a new approach to company organization was required within the existing conditions: we needed special system for work sharing and project management. And the decision was taken, we chose Instant Business Network. Intertex administration took into account the specific characteristics of company performance, complicated scheme of in-company collaboration and lack of experience in implementation and usage of such kind of systems, and decided to divide business processes automation into several stages.
On the first stage IBN was used for creating and control of simple everyday tasks. It helped to resolve two issues:
1) Company employees transferred the current work to IBN: started with ToDos and events creating, keeping documents in the IBN file library and collaborative usage of them, discussed working process on IBN objects’ forums and via IBN Client.
2) Employees got the required experience in using IBN and started to consider it as essential part of working process. This made it possible for company administration to move to the more serious stage with no doubt in the successful result.
The goal of the second stage was automation of Intertex project activity. By this moment all the employees had enough experience in working with IBN. This allowed us to transfer company projects to IBN in a short period of time without any substantial difficulties. This stage was the exact time for Intertex to use tools of work sharing: company projects required participation of users from different offices and departments. It helped Intertex to organize effective communication between local offices and international logistic office. At the same time managers of different levels started active using IBN time tracking system and attracted other users to account their working time.
On the third stage the company started to use IBN Help desk system for Issue management. The Help Desk module was used only for internal issues tracking before. Now it provides organization of requests and supplies of our products. The new approach made it possible to register requests automatically and track working with them, and what is essential - to react instantly to emergent difficulties.
Within the last stage of IBN implementation, Intertex planned to use IBN for collaboration with suppliers, logistics managers, auditors, lawyers and other exterior organizations. IBN tools of working with partners and external users made it possible to organize access to required data for people from exterior organizations without any threat to company confidentiality. Attracting external users to working within IBN required certain efforts related to partners training. However, Intertex specialists got the experience in staff training on the first stage of implementation. Thus the last stage was completed even earlier than it was planned.
The result of Instant Business Network implementation is ability for Intertex to organize company performance through the IBN system. Moreover, the company became able to attract clients and partners to using IBN, and this allowed us to focus all the working information in the single area, organize collaboration between employees, unify accounts and reports and move the control activity to a higher level. The implementation was successful thanks to accurate planning of implementation stages, gradual transfer of the current work to IBN, and using the experience of previous stages when starting every new one.
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