SharePoint Key to New Submittals Process

In June, 2007, Fahrenkrug came to Jeffries with a new request. A new phase of the project had started — the submittal phase — and he needed technology to support it. During the submittal phase, architects and engineers create drawings which they release to subcontractors, who bid on the projects and create new, more detailed drawings. These documents then get sent back to the architects and engineers for review and approval.

“I thought this was a huge undertaking,” says Jeffries of the submittal phase. “If we could get a solution for them using SharePoint, it would be huge.”

Her first effort to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to automate the submittal process ran into complications. SharePoint’s workflow didn’t support the architects’ and engineers’ needs. They wanted to use a certain naming convention for .PDF files, and they didn’t want users renaming files. The problem, says Jeffries: SharePoint wants users to rename .PDF files after they’ve checked them out of a library and are ready to return them.

To fix this problem, recoding SharePoint would take too much work and would complicate software updates and patches. So Jeffries wound up creating three separate sites — one called submittals out, where all specifications are uploaded for review; a coordination site, where the architects can review the contractors’ changes and suggestions; and a third called submittals in, where the architects submit specs to the owner reps. She says creating three separate sites was much easier than customizing the software. The beauty of SharePoint is that it makes creating these sites a cinch, she says.

Setting up three separate sites also ensured that all of the versioning that needed to take place during each phase of the submittal process happened in the right site, and ensured that versioning was complete at each phase of the submittal process, says Jeffries. The sites went live on July 13.

Today, the Van Andel Institute has four SharePoint sites supporting the construction project, with 18 document libraries for each of the three submittal sites and 25 document libraries on the original SharePoint site used for the design phase of the project, says Jeffries. Each folder within each of the document libraries on the submittal sites can contain 100 or more documents. “The paperwork alone being maintained here is amazing,” she adds.

The sites support 108 users and 200 or more gigabytes of storage according to Fahrenkrug.

Fahrenkrug estimates that the new building, which is expected to be complete late next year, is about 40 to 45 percent complete today. “It’s right on schedule. It’s on budget,” he says. And that’s due in no small part to SharePoint.

“The fact that we used SharePoint for the submittal process will definitely keep us on track,” Campbell says.

Sidebar | Tips for Getting the Most from SharePoint

1.Train users. “If you can’t get people to use SharePoint, putting a site together is not worth the effort,” says Kim Jeffries, an application analyst with the Van Andel Institute.

2.Give novice users targeted tips.

“When I created an account for a new SharePoint users, I sent them an e-mail with their user name and password and some quick tips on how to access the account, what level of security they had, and what that meant in terms of what they could and couldn’t do, how to use the calendar, and how to use a document library,” says Jeffries.

3.Follow the three-click rule.

Within the SharePoint site, says Jeffries, keep content as close to the surface as possible. “You should be able to get done what you need to get done in three clicks,” she says.

4.Make sure you have enough storage.

By the end of the Van Andel Institute’s building expansion, the SharePoint sites might take up one terabyte of storage, says Bryon Campbell, CIO of the Institute.

5.Understand SharePoint’s capabilities and limitations.

“SharePoint is not the end all be all of software, but it works if you understand what it can and can’t do,” says Matt Fahrenkrug, owner of Culhane & Fahrenkrug Consulting. “By understanding that, you can manipulate the software and get to the result that you want.”

— M LEVINSON