1-page Solution Brief - Posted 11/1/2006
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Leading novelty giftware manufacturer boosts productivity and gains business insight with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Lava World needed to access, search, view, and store vital product and financial information, as well as to automate the workflow for production specifications and changes.
Situation
Headquartered in Elmhurst, Illinois, Lava World International, Inc. is a recognized leader in the novelty giftware industry. The company manufactures LAVA® brand products and distributes novelty items worldwide, including the famous LAVA® Brand Motion Lamp.
Over the years, Lava World has changed its business model to take advantage of the many operational and financial opportunities found in global manufacturing. To coordinate efforts among its international manufacturing, sales and distribution partners, Lava World has relied extensively on e-mail and file sharing to communicate vital information. However, this process has created a number of significant challenges. Too much time was spent each day tracking down information and writing new documents rather than leveraging existing documents; valuable time was also wasted trying to find information from disparate sources and then ensuring that the appropriate people had the most current versions. Lava World's e-mail and file sharing created bottlenecks in the project approval process, delaying important product decisions. Finally, Lava World's executives were unable to access Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to get an accurate picture of how the company was performing in vital areas and make adjustments accordingly. Lava World needed a portal solution to provide selected information to its executives, as well as help its sales and production teams better communicate about products.
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SharePoint Server 2007's business intelligence, basic content management, workflow approval, search and portal features allow us to operate on a global scale by gaining business insight to work more efficiently and collaborate more effectively. |
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Ronald John Pejerl
General Manager/CFO
Haggerty Enterprises/Lava World International, Inc. |
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Solution
As a participant in the Microsoft® Rapid Deployment Technology Adoption Program, Lava World worked with partner AccessTek, Inc. to implement Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 integrated with a Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains 9.0 data store. This solution is running on a HP ProLiant DL380 G4 server to provide high performance, reliability, availability and meet future scalability needs. This solution will allow Lava World to access, search, view, and store product and financial information, as well as to automate the production specifications workflow.
Lava World will take advantage of document workspaces in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to set expiration dates, assign versioning controls, and protect information. Additionally, the company will be able to boost productivity by simplifying everyday business activities, especially Product Specification Sheet approvals. Office SharePoint Server 2007's out-of-the-box workflows allow Lava World to initiate, track and report document reviews and approvals, issue tracking, and signature collection. This will eliminate the approval bottlenecks that used to slow down specification processing.
In the past, Lava World's executives relied on the company's Finance department to update and distribute hard copies of Excel spreadsheets. By implementing Office SharePoint Server 2007's interactive business intelligence portals – especially the executive dashboard – executives can locate the latest reports, spreadsheets and KPIs anytime the information is needed. And by creating a sales portal equipped with Enterprise Search capabilities, Lava World's global sales force will be able to search e-mails and file shares for relevant information.
Benefits
- To ensure employees use current product specifications and receive updates by creating a central repository of documentation and implementing versioning control features
- To make it easier to find and reuse information during all stages of production, sales and distribution by creating customer-specific document libraries
- To ensure executives have access to the latest reports, spreadsheets and KPIs by implementing business intelligence tools such as an executive dashboard
- To enable more efficient and insightful decision-making with integrated content search capabilities
The information contained in this document relates to prerelease software product which may be substantially modified before its first commercial release. Accordingly, the information may not accurately describe or reflect the software product when first commercially released. This document is provided for informational purposes only and Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to this document or the information contained in it. Microsoft, InfoPath, the Office logo, and SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Document published November 2006.
