Quality Management Software Customization for a Global Lead Producer and Recycler

Summary

A global lead producer and recycler runs its production on strictly followed policies and procedures, managed in a SharePoint-based quality management system whose documents cover every facility. To extend and optimize that system, INNERLUXES spread quality management functionality across all branch sites, added policy-acknowledgment controls and automatic change notifications, created secure collaboration spaces for confidential production documents, and turned manual knowledge spreadsheets into automated competency surveys for HR — keeping the workforce aligned with the company's internal regulations.

About the Client

The Client is an international company specializing in lead production and recycling. It runs more than 20 facilities across the United States, Europe, and Africa, produces over 800,000 tons of lead and lead alloys annually, reaches nearly 3 billion US dollars in revenue, and employs more than 3,000 people, also offering consulting on lead production and metalworking.

Extending a SharePoint Quality Management System

The Client ensures effective production by relying on established policies and procedures that all employees must follow, stored, used, and updated in a SharePoint-based quality management system covering production at each facility. To optimize and extend it, the Client engaged INNERLUXES to:

• Spread the quality management functionality across all sites in the Client's site collection.
• Enable automatic notifications so employees stay aware of changes to policies and procedures.
• Provide a separate collaboration space for sharing confidential documents tied to particular production processes.
• Create SharePoint-based surveys to test employees' knowledge of the relevant policies and procedures.

Functionality Delivered Across Every Branch Site

The Client's SharePoint site collection held independent sites for its different branches, so INNERLUXES brought the quality management functionality to every site and populated them with the relevant documents, addressing each requirement in turn:

• Policy acknowledgment — custom acknowledgment features let managers confirm that employees have read the required policies and are aware of all production details.
• Change notifications — SharePoint event receivers send automatic notifications whenever a policy or procedure is modified or a new document is added.
• Secure collaboration spaces — separate spaces within the system let employees with the right permissions share and collaborate on confidential documents for specific production processes.
• Automated competency surveys — custom survey forms that previously lived in separate spreadsheets and were distributed by hand are now offered to employees by HR managers according to specialization; answers are processed automatically and delivered to the responsible HR manager, who assesses results and readiness to perform production tasks.

Consistent, Compliant Production Across Branches

• The tuned quality management system makes crucial policies accessible across all of the company's branches.
• Distributed permissions ensure confidential documents are available only to authorized users.
• HR managers can monitor employees' knowledge of policies and run assessment surveys, supporting a stable working process compliant with the company's internal regulations.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Workflows, C#, JavaScript.