SharePoint Development Case Study - SharePoint Purchase Requisition Portal

Industry

e-Commerce

Customer Profile

A leading online retailer for kids’ and teenagers. The company has an online ecommerce platform that integrates all the 10 brands and provides unified shopping experience to customers.

Benefits

  • Going green with paper-less requisitions and approval process
  • Avoid human errors by mapping exact accounting information with the requests
  • Effective tracking of request and approval process
  • Proper information flow between the request forms and ERP systems
  • Speedy approval cycles
  • Increased user traffic to Intranet portal
  • Elasticity within the workflow process to accommodate changes

Technology Used

  • Visual Studio 2012
  • C#.NET
  • SharePoint 2013 Server Enterprise
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2008
  • Client-Side Object Model with Workflows
  • OData Services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV Integration

 

Congruent built the purchase requisition portal on SharePoint 2013 and successfully integrated the Intranet Portal with the backend ERP system. The system currently used by 300+ users raising purchase requisitions through this portal.

 

Customer Situation

  • Had recently upgraded their Intranet portal from SharePoint 2010 Standard to SharePoint 2013 Enterprise
  • Employees had been using paper-based requisition forms which had been going through manual approval process
  • Finance team intended to bring in e-forms and automate the approval through an effective workflow to integrate with the ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013) for raising purchase orders

Congruent's Solution

  • Built purchase requisition forms (custom ASPX pages) embedding the re-usable web part components
  • Master data (Vendor information) from the ERP system was being synchronized with the SharePoint portal at regular intervals using RESTful services
  • Request forms once submitted, went through a custom workflow process built using State-Machine workflow
  • Workflow, when completed, initiated the Purchase Order creation process using Microsoft Dynamics NAV’s Code Units which are exposed as web services
  • Purchase orders, thus created, were attached to the Purchase Requisitions in the portal
  • Purchase requisition data in the form of SharePoint request link was tagged to the Purchase Order in Microsoft Dynamics NAV system for correlation

Congruent's Key Challenges

  • Custom workflow routing option based on different business-specification parameters
  • Security hardening and lookup filters for purchase requisitions
  • Flexible form design to accommodate business process changes
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