SharePoint Portal Development for a Car Spare Parts Distributor

Summary

A spare-parts distributor affiliated with a large car manufacturer ran an intensive business with its dealers but had no centralized way to collaborate or manage documents, leaving it buried in unstructured agreements, catalogs, and price lists. Through an IT-solutions partner, INNERLUXES built a SharePoint external portal that structures all of those documents, gives each dealer secure access and a personalized workspace, makes search fast, and reports on dealer activity — transforming how the distributor works with its dealer network.

About the Client

The direct Client is an IT-solutions provider specializing in customizing Microsoft products. The end client is a company affiliated with a large car manufacturer that runs extensive production lines and produces more than a million cars a year.

Unstructured Paperwork Slowed Dealer Collaboration

The end client's business was built on intensive collaboration with spare-parts dealers, but with no centralized collaboration or document management system, it had accumulated a large volume of unstructured documents — agreements, spare-parts catalogs, price lists, and more — making paperwork inefficient and very time-consuming. The distributor needed an effective way to structure documents and ease their processing, strengthen collaboration with dealers, and report accurately on dealer activity.

A SharePoint External Portal With Structured Docs and Dealer Sites

A SharePoint portal was the right fit for these needs. The project began by deploying SharePoint Server 2007 and importing all current documents, then organizing and securing them for everyday use:

• Structured document storage — content types were defined for each document to build a logical, easy-to-use store, and a separate library of document templates lets dealers create new documents faster.
• Per-dealer access and sites — every dealer was granted access rights to prevent unauthorized access, and each received a personalized site to work with documents and templates and collaborate with managers.
• Fast search — to solve the most urgent problem of slow document search, INNERLUXES added a rich set of search-enabling attributes for each content type.
• Activity reporting — the portal was enriched with reporting built on SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), letting the end client evaluate dealer activity and plan spare-parts supplies more accurately.

A Reliable System for the Dealer Network

• The SharePoint portal reshaped the entire process of working with dealers.
• The end client gained a reliable system to categorize numerous documents, use templates to create new ones, search quickly, collaborate with dealers, and obtain accurate reports on dealer activity.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2007, MS SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, MS Visual Studio 2007, TFS, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, CSS, jQuery, MS Project, Jira, JavaScript.