SchäferShop, Siegen – requirements management

 

Schäfer Shop is part of the Schäfer Group and has developed into one of Europe’s most important outfitters for warehouses, operations and workshops within 75 years. Schäfer Shop offers high-quality and comprehensive solutions for all the needs of companies in the areas of warehouse equipment, office equipment, office supplies and promotional items. Schäfer Shop is represented in 9 European countries and has its own international procurement organization.

Conditions:

The objective was the bundling of all inquiries and collection of all requirements in the company, not only aimed at IT, but also at all other areas of the company. The increasing number of inquiries throughout the company, combined with the increasing complexity of the handling processes, had led to many queries and lengthy searches for up-to-date information in the past. When employees were on vacation, the processing status was unclear and work could not always be completed on time. With a view to company-wide use, several target mailboxes should be set up for the individual areas in order to process and classify requests. The requirements should then be automatically assigned to a responsible team via a system of rules and passed through a release and approval process.

Individual requirements from the project:

  • Requirements are classified across four categories with different metadata, some with a stored approval process.
  • Documents related to a requirement should be able to be recorded and assigned. Document folders should also be supported here.
  • The processing process should be controlled via a defined requirement status. The status is set by the user or by a predefined set of rules with if-then rules.
  • Automatic email notifications to stakeholders with notification logging.
  • Automatically export requirement data at a specific status for transfer to a third-party system.

Challenges:

  • Automatic creation of a folder in the document library for each requirement.
  • Structure of a set of rules with approx. 20 rules.
  • Display of all requests for a cost center depending on the user’s cost center.
  • Changing customer requests and goals.

Result:

As a result, complete requirements management for Schäfershop was mapped with the introduction of LTRS for Microsoft SharePoint. The implementation took place as a standard system with configured extensions, largely without additional programming. Thanks to flexible function modules, it was possible to react quickly to changing customer requirements, so that a standard solution could be expanded, adapted and introduced in an iterative manner. Already within the first 4 months since the introduction, over 1200 requirements have been processed with the LTRS requirements management.

This is what the customer says:

After the processes had been defined, a SharePoint-based solution was found with the “Requirements Management/LTRS” project to speed up and simplify the processing of requirements throughout the company. With Locatech we have found the project partner who competently implemented the solution and also fulfilled change requests reliably and quickly. The standard product LTRS for Microsoft SharePoint already provided 95% of the required functions, so only minor extensions were necessary. With requirements management, we have a working solution that makes all company requirements transparent and evaluable, and just a few months after the introduction we see great potential for savings and automation!

Frank Selbach, Head of Organization & IT

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