How Real Businesses are using SharePoint?

A 70% jump has been seen in SharePoint usage by businesses over the last five years.80% of these businesses rely on SharePoint, mainly for document management. But several businesses are also using it for tasks such as reporting, social networking, process automation, implementation of work-flows etc.

However, many such businesses fail to truly leverage the features and capabilities of SharePoint platform.

So, to provide you a better understanding of what all can be achieved using SharePoint, we have compiled a few mini case studies from our own past projects.

1. Pharma Industry: Innovation and technological progress have revolutionized IT services and processes for the pharmaceutical industry. The growth of secure cloud-based application services, mobile interactions and digitization of clinical data have improved process effectiveness and time to market. Pharma industries are also looking to migrate from their legacy platforms. They are constantly searching for solutions or services that would provide their employees with the required agility in their daily operations. They also need a platform which would comply with the statutory and regulatory requirements of a pharma company.In this industry, each company has huge sales manpower, who meet their clients across the allocated geography regularly. Clients have their own set of requirements, the turnaround period of fulfilling those requirements drops significantly, due to lack of proper coordination and collaboration mechanism between sales team.Also, for the same sales team, keeping a track of their activities in terms of leads, their progress and statuses are also not transparent across the organization. This affects the business, as head offices struggle to get accurate results. The SharePoint solution for such case would be:
   • To move to one standard solution in order to help employees better communicate with everyone within the company. The logical move would be to consolidate everyone on a global messaging platform.
   • Transition from an on-premises unreliable messaging system to a dedicated hosted solution.
   • Office 365 gives the ability to integrate future growth, be it organic or inorganic. More importantly, nowadays, SharePoint platform can deliver unified communications and value-added services to employees, enhancing productivity and experience.
   • Tailor-made solutions for three major business management processes: communication and collaboration; reporting and expenses; and finally, client specific requirement.

   SharePoint introduction can reduce IT support and maintenance costs by as much as 60%. It can also reduce overall total cost of investment by 50%. It can also enhance business processes by 15% through integrated and scalable design solutions.

2. Oil and Gas Company and Manufacturing: The major challenge of this sector are its multiple locations spread worldwide and its need to provide a single platform where all employees can meet virtually and take advantage of social networking within the organization.As the main required feature of the project is social Networking, SharePoint 2013 on premise was the preferred platform for the development of social networking within the organization. Majority of SharePoint 2013’s social features were used to develop this intranet portal. Implementation of workflows and permission levels were made easier due to SharePoint.As a result, all employees can share details with each other despite being located at different places. They are able to share and exchange greetings, documents, floor plans, new employee list etc. This tool has helped them immensely by putting together everyone, under one roof virtually.
3. Healthcare industry: In this particular case, the healthcare company had invented a unique product to help people. They were clearly overwhelmed with the sheer number of business documents. These documents ranged from proposals, research papers, vendor management documents, confidential documents, sales and marketing document to financial documents etc.It was a nightmare for employees to manage all these documents. Through SharePoint document management system they were able to ease the process. They are currently using many features like access controls, document version management, approval workflows as well as cloud storage. Now all documents are in the cloud and working effortlessly.
4. Government administrations: The long and tedious process of approvals becomes a headache for the Government administration employees. They have to follow a stringent approval process for every task they undertake. These tasks also generate bulk documentation. We have analyzed their processes and provided them with a simple solution in combination with SharePoint. The workflows which was developed by us demonstrates remarkable simplicity for an otherwise complex regulatory and process heavy domain.
5. Financial services: A financial entrepreneur was looking for RMS (Risk management system) for their internal use. Their requirements are presented below:
   • Portal can be accessible from any device
   • Round the clock seamless connectivity
   • Data should not store locally
   • User login with two factor authentication

   The client already had Office 365 enterprise subscription. We analyzed their case based on their requirements and inquired for the RMS processes, forms, workflows etc.

   After understanding the whole scenario, we advised them to adopt SharePoint. SharePoint satisfied the criteria set by their requirements.

   They also wanted to integrate document management system within their existing SharePoint portal. We customized this according to their needs and integrated it within the new portal. Another key aspect which they wanted to integrate within the portal was “search-ability” to make fetching of metadata, faster. This feature was developed within SharePoint and integrated as per the client needs as well.

   Overall, we have provided a simple yet demonstrable case by case study of the benefits of SharePoint. The flexibility and reliability provided by SharePoint can provide your business with the edge it may have been lacking till now.