Case Study: Collaboration Suite

A portfolio of workflow applications enabling collaboration across international boundaries

The Business

Industry
Automotive

The Challenge
Build a group of applications with a common user interface and single point of access to support the organisation's business processes among international teams located across multiple sites in Europe

The Platform
Lotus Notes

Key Benefits
Single point of access combined with common 'look and feel' and consolidated navigation

The native replication technology in Lotus Notes enabling applications to be easily distributed to remote servers and yet all content to be synchronised against a standard schedule, protecting the organisation's bandwidth

Incremental development and implementation of new applications into the suite of successive business process solutions

The native security model in Lotus Notes enabling granular security to be applied differentially to each successive application and their content

The Solution

Working with an international multi-division manufacturing organisation, Thomas Norton have built and delivered a wide portfolio of workflow applications to enable multi-disciplinary teams to collaborate across international boundaries. The applications have been deployed across the corporate network and are available to all staff through standard secure authenticated access.

The focus of these applications is:

• customer relationship management (including pricing, samples, contract management, contact management and warranty)
• quality management (including complaint handling, process management, document management and legislation tracking)
• purchasing and financial control
• human resource management
  

They also provide connectivity to host data, adding workflow and collaboration capabilities to data not normally available to end-users.

Where the customer needs to respond quickly to changes in organisational procedure and structure, the continued evolution of these applications is supported by the rapid application development capabilities of the solution platform.