VMOG improves Business critical information storage and collaboration among its functional areas and multi-located Business Teams

Vmog : COMPANY PROFILE

A Vallourec Mannesmann Oil and Gas UK Ltd. is the largest UK based manufacturer and supplier of OCTG to the North Sea Oil & Gas Industry. The company operates OCTG heat treatment facilities and threading at it's plant.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Effectively managing information is business-critical for Company, which has significant number of Sales Orders, Internal Request for Service Agents, Stock orders, Senior managers Base sheets, New Starters/Leavers, Travel Authorisation, Subcontracted works etc and Business teams working from five different locations in UK, Norway and Netherland which includes Bureau, Threading Plant, Gas Sites etc. A high level of collaboration is of prime importance among different functional teams.

Many of these activities were being carried out using Lotus Notes databases but they have not been changed and re-aligned to current level Business for almost 5 years. Slowly changing dimensions were making the use of Lotus Notes databases obsolete and less applicable to business activities.

There were issues of redundancy, data integrity and workflows do not match to current procedures and practices.

Adoption of MS Exchange Server has also posed new set of problems, as Lotus Notes does not knit very well with Outlook and other Office tools. This made sensitive information residing on laptops in outlook, never making it to company servers. As Managers spending significant amounts of time outside the office each month, there were various gaps in maintaining organized information/data at central place due to which company was experiencing high lead time to retrieve/recover pertinent data at the time of need and thus making it expensive, sometimes resulting into failures of commitments with internal or external business groups.

Apart from this, company uses System 21 ERP package build on DB2 databases, There is no linkage of ERP with Lotus Notes applications, this again posed a major challenge of maintaining Data redundancy and sorting other anomalies in different systems.

SOLUTION

SharePoint Application Center using MOSS

After due diligence, Globrin team explained to Company Management and IT Department to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and migrate all its Lotus Notes application to new platform with significant improvements in them.VMOG considered SharePoint platform as main collaborative environment because SharePoint provides a centralized, transparent, and easily accessible platform for remote teams, managers, and management to work effectively together to efficiently manage business activities. Due to intricate workflow requirements and the need to better share, store, and organize data among business teams, Company's IT department deployed SharePoint as its new content management and collaboration platform.

Globrin reviewed around 18 Lotus Notes databases and decided to migrate 14 of them to SharePoint Technology Platform. GAP analysis helped in identifying areas of enhancements and change in functional areas to which each of these application applies to

Applications redeveloped and migrated to SharePoint are:

• Several Site Collections with Customisations and Configurations
• Several Window Services each representing unique activity
• Custom Web services
• Office ADDINs for Outlook to add email messages to SharePoint Forms Repository
• MS Infopath Forms Templates
• Sequential and State machine Workflows (based on Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation) specifically develop to manage lifecycle of content types
• Integration with Active Directory
• GDI + control for making drawing of Pipe on the fly based on Pipe Specifications
• Supplier Performance database and charting control for making line graphs
• Linked server object to synchronize with ERP package

New Solution helped over all organisation particularly managers, can access and update information, including enquiry forms, tasks assigned to them, relevant emails, anywhere seamlessly into SharePoint. Audit Trail is also maintained within each form and record to give complete information from start to end.

Routing of document from one person to other person or group is managed by system with alerts on regular intervals improved its usage.

Globrin Team had several brain storming sessions and interview rounds with the Business users and the Company IT Manager to simplify each of the activity such that every bit of system has meaning and its contribution.

Special emphasis is given on the Usability and navigation plan.

Particularly, Several Activities which spans across more than one department or triggers other subsequent activities with minimal human interactions are seamlessly integrated in custom workflows; it has significant contribution in easy adoption of new solution among business users.

Globrin "very quickly met all the needs" by finishing the whole solution in less than 20 weeks.

Over and above this, the Company had cost advantage due to offshore development facilities of Globrin.

Results

Company has seen a significant interest in users while implementation and found no difficulty in migration to new platform. The company has been able to: