Customer has about 2,000 sales outlets (owed and partner-based) across all Russia and more than 600 sales consultants specialized on certain brands.

Previously, managers scheduled consultants manually in Excel and sent resulting schedules to consultants once in a month.

Service development goal was to automate work schedules creation (based on previous months’ data) and distribution.

Main challenges of system development included the following:

• Setting up work schedules access rights based on user position, department, region and certain brands knowledge.
• Possibility to automatically prepare schedule based on past months information. Each consultant can work in different retail outlets according to specific schedule. He/she can have sick leaves, vacations and compensatory leaves and replace employees in other outlets – all this information is taken into account when constructing a schedule.
• In parallel with a consultant’s work schedule, a load schedule for each outlet is created. It is possible to manage data from any of these schedules.
• Automatic data check in case of any changes. For example, it should not be possible to assign a consultant to work in different outlets at the same time.
• Ability to lock schedules from changes for individual consultants;
• System performance is a critical requirement.
• Data on consultants from different departments was stored in different locations using different formats.

Project development and implementation included the following:

• System architecture, functional and graphical design works. Deliverables – functional UML diagrams and UI mockups;
• Import of data on consultants from various external systems.
• System coding according to functional requirements. Development of algorithm that allows connecting consultant work schedule with the outlet load schedule. The algorithm ensures complete data consistency.
• Development of non-standard access rights setup system which uses SharePoint lists and allows configuration by administrators.
• DevExpress controls, JavaScript JQuery and knockout.js libraries were used for schedule creation and management forms.
• All user access rights configuration is done using SharePoint groups and lists.
• Since information on each consultant can be stored for several years, it required development of storage architecture that reduces number of rows and columns in the list to maximize SharePoint lists data access speed.
• Partial data download was implemented to speed up tables with embedded graphics.
• Schedules are uploaded to Excel.
• All user controls are completely interactive and operate without page reload.
• Development of user and administrator documentation;
• Customer key users training;
• Full system testing, go live and putting system into full production mode.

System was deployed into corporate SharePoint portal in spring 2015. Data on more than 600 consultants was imported from external systems.

System allowed reducing time spent by managers to create and distribute schedules by more than three times. Only manual operations left are start of schedule creation, entry of information on sick leaves, vacations and compensatory leaves and noting of employee transfer to different outlet.

System evolution plan was developed together with the Customer. It provides for managing consultants work time down to single hour within a day to allow consultants work in different outlets same day. Meal breaks will be taken into account as well.