29.06.2016

FORS today announced that at Sportmaster company it has been launched into industrial operation an advanced electronic workflow system based on Oracle BPM Suite. By scalability and coverage of Oracle software products stack, this workflow project stays unbeatable in Russia so far.

Previous project at the same customer was challenging as well, being focused on deployment of the enhanced Corporate Portal based on Oracle WebCenter. Nowadays Portal is in active use, serving as a robust platform for business communications.

Sportmaster company is one of the TOP-10 world biggest retailers of goods for sports and entertainment. In this market segment, by the revenue amount it stable gains the position #1 in Russia and Eastern Europe. Having a distributed geographical structure, company constantly grows, including now more than 450 stores at 200 cities in Russia and border countries.

Functionality and growth capabilities of the previous electronic workflow system based on Lotus Notes could not meet the needs of the rapidly expanding business, that’s why it was adopted a decision to switch to the Oracle BPM Suite as the most advanced, powerful, scalable and reliable platform with the full set of technological tools for efficient business management.

At the moment of choice, customer has already operated various Oracle based back-office systems. Application of solutions from the single vendor would enable to cut expenses on integration, employees training and future system development giving a benefit of fast ROI.

«We are absolutely happy with our choice of the solution and integrator», — remarks Hermann Alexeev, CIO of Sportmaster company. — The main result of the project — fully automated processing of the unstructured raw documents. Implementation of the enhanced workflow system enabled us to drive business-processes at all our points of presence to the single BPM-standard. Does not matter where the office is located — we always could be sure in the correctness of users’ actions. It is very important that integrator provided smooth migration from one system to another, performing on the highest professional level. It was not just the simple migration of the functionality from one platform to another; the processes themselves were modified dramatically. As a rule, it is not easy, but in cooperation with the integrator we succeeded».

Improved business processes featured new abilities based on the developed unified structure for their description and definition, including agreements, contractors, letters of attorney and orders base, being standard for all Sportmaster offices.

Project has lasted 2 years and covered modernization and migration of data of two inherited sub-systems — «Orders» and «Agreements».

FORS specialists made a total description of business processes, as they have been on Lotus Notes and gave detailed recommendations on their optimization, as they should be on the Oracle BPM Suite. Upon that, established work practices and processes were transferred very carefully. This, along with the extended functionality of the system, ensured users loyalty during migration.

The most serious attention was given to the special customers’ requirements to the system: processing of the historical data, personalization and multilingual capabilities. At the moment, user’s work is personalized in respect of the interface language choice, tuning of the screen forms and data sorting arrangement there. Afterwards, there would be provided personal tuning of the other user’ interface attributes: search screen, featured documents, etc.

Multilingualism is supported for applying of documents attributes and tuning of users screen interfaces.

New electronic workflow system was integrated with other information systems operated at Sportmaster.

Project would be developed both broad and deep — number of the automated processes covered by the system would grow along with the functionality spread out.