Customer Profile –

The George Fern Company is a leading national service contractor serving more than 750 expositions and hundreds of other events held annually throughout the United States and Canada. The George Fern Company provides a full range of services for expositions, show organizers and their participating exhibitors. They also provide services for conventions, meeting planners, corporate events and corporate exhibit managers.

Background –

The George Fern Company was running its operations on an old AS 400 system. Most if not all of the business operations communications were accomplished through emails/phone calls. Due to the nature of the communications, both phone and email, there was no accurate way to save and store the details of those communications. Further, there was no way to compile, analyze and report what had transpired. Much information was just plain lost, necessitating recalling and re-emailing. Needless to say there was no storage of the important details. This resulted in highly inefficient operations; the delivery model was unworkable and unprofitable. Working with SharePoint Engine three key processes were identified: graphics design and delivery, carpet delivery and operations.

Business Challenge –

Due to no unified flow of information and lack of communication, productivity suffered greatly inhibiting profitability and causing disruptions in the delivery of services. Operations could not perform in an efficient manner nor perform the services required in a timely and accurate fashion, again adversely affecting profitability.

Solution –

For some time the George Fern Company was considering the automation of its business processes. Seeing their sister company Champs using and profiting with a system based on SharePoint, they decided to engage SharePoint Engine to design and implement a system based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SharePoint Engine worked with the George Fern Company to design and implement an initial pilot project consisting of the three key business processes. Once the pilot was successful they upgraded to SharePoint Server from the legacy AS 400 system.

The first two business processes were automated via Workflow based on Windows Workflow Foundation as part of SharePoint. This allowed a single data entry point and unified the flow of information. Tracking the work orders became possible via simple reporting in SharePoint. A complete and integrated information flow was managed via this process.

For the third business process, operations, the information was synced from the legacy AS 400 application into SharePoint and custom web parts were built for reporting and managing the show and customer Information. This enabled much better show schedule management for the operations team. Also, each show is like a separate project for the company where different teams collaborate and execute their operations. Having collaboration sites for individual shows greatly improved the performance and efficiency for different teams working on the show. Labor costs were driven down significantly.

Benefits –

By redesigning and implementing these three key business processes successfully, the George Fern Company has confidence to move forward with the upgrading of the entire system and automating other processes with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Improved Efficiency and Accuracy –

Having a central repository, unified information flow and automation of the business processes enabled a huge improvement in efficiency and accuracy in operations and delivery.

Improved Reporting and Resource Management –

Accurate tracking of all work orders across all locations has enabled better management of resources. Managers can make informed decisions now with consolidated, accurate and timely information. Labor performance and cost reduction has been greatly increased.

Accurate and timely information storage and retrieval –

Having a central repository for critical data from the business processes has helped in the reuse of that data and management of the operations. The management use of this information now actually drives the operations efficiently.