Industry Overview - Manufacturing

Manufacturing enterprises are becoming more and more complex. Having the fastest, least expensive, and best automated manufacturing operation within one's "four walls" is no longer sufficient to gain competitive advantage. As the manufacturing industry is ready for recovery, top companies are relying on SharePoint to drive that momentum. SharePoint and Bamboo are positioned as the enterprise platform that can help meet these competitive challenges of shrinking time to market, reducing manufacturing costs, increasing quality and building an infrastructure to support rapid integration of new acquisitions.

Solutions Brief - Manufacturing

When a major manufacturer looked to improve its ISO 9001 document workflow and management, it turned to Bamboo to add the necessary functionality to create a world class quality management solution. Reliably documenting its quality and safety procedures was mission critical, and documentation had to be maintained in an easily accessible format. Furthermore, to ensure the repeatability and accountability inherent in maintaining ISO 9001 certification, procedural and process revisions had to be communicated and updated quickly.

The solution was to implement a document repository and management system centered on SharePoint. Using SharePoint, a single, computerized document repository houses existing documents relating to ISO quality processes, including control documents and records, internal audits, training documents and corrective/preventative (CAR/PAR) action requests. This repository used Bamboo's navigation, search and many other feature enhancements to enrich the user interaction and management of content.

The solution also utilizes Bamboo's workflow to route and track new documents through authoring, modification, and approval before they are accepted into the quality document library. If existing documents require modification, workflows properly route and track them through approval as well.

As an adjunct of the workflow implementation, the company utilized advanced notification and alerts. With it, Abel Solutions created a system to inform personnel charged with specific quality objectives whenever changes occurred. Prompt notification ensures that new procedures and processes are implemented quickly, positively impacting both quality and safety. The solution affords the customer the flexibility to move beyond generic SharePoint alerts and define specialized, query-based alerts without the need for custom workflow development. This alerting feature is also being used to measure and monitor progress within the Quality Management System. Specifically, when actions in the process are not performed within their required timeframes, alerts are triggered and sent to supervisors and Quality Management personnel about the issue so that action can be taken. Overall, the impact of the implementation for the company has been significant.