Electrum Case Study: SJP

Key Benefits: Authors can easily kick off workflows on a number of documents, which then e-mails out each of the users automatically with their tasks. When they are finished their tasks, the author is informed. This means the process flows smoothly and everyone knows what task they have to do by what time. The system sends out e-mails automatically when certain tasks are performed. This means the author never needs to manually send an e-mail or look for a contact address; .approve will e-mail all of the relevant people when at the right times. As no software is required, reviewers can log in and carry out their work from any PC, even from home! Key Features: Streamlined Process Automatic e-mails Easy management of workflows Full version history No software required

Company Profile

Perivan is a privately owned communications, design and financial printing company and they work with St. James Place (Wealth Management) to collaborate, approve and print client facing documents.

Project Brief

The process of bouncing documents between Perivan and St. James Place was fast becoming hard to manage and unreliable as users had no formal list of what documents were being processed and at what stage each approval was at.

Perivan approached Electrum for a solution to the problem.

Our Solution

After analysing the requirements of both companies, a solution built on Microsoft SharePoint was implemented.

The solution is based around a number of custom Workflows which can be initiated on documents including PDF’s, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel Spreadsheets. The Workflows allow authors to log in and start a Review on a document, which sends off separate copies of the document to each of the selected reviewers as links in an email. Each reviewer can view and amend their own copy of the document, without affecting the original. As each reviewer finishes, they can complete their task and when everyone has completed reviewing the document, the author can merge all comments together.

When reviewing Office files, the .approve Office Add-in can be used by authors to merge all changes/comments together giving a complete overview of all changes made. The author can then easily choose to accept or reject each change.

Once a review is complete, the author can then run the Approval and Sign Off workflows which work in a similar way. The result is a document which has been reviewed and approved by several users and can be confidently sent for print.

As well as the workflows, the interface gives a clear layout of all documents which can also be searched. Each user can be set with a different permission level depending on how much, or how little, you want them to see.

Stuart McMeechan, Project Manager : SharePoint gives the users a clear, user friendly environment to upload and manage documents in. The workflows developed by the team are reliable and reduce a lot of the work load which makes the process incredibly easier to manage.