## Overview

ITSTEADY has automated the client’s business processes using new product development and quality management software. In turn, this allowed fully digital document exchange, approvals, and notifications.

## The Project at a Glance

### Industry

Personal care product manufacturing

### Project team

7 people

### Team members’ average experience

3 years

### Project duration

4 months

### Effort

6 person-months

### Technologies

C#, JavaScript, SharePoint Framework, .NET client-side object model (CSOM), React.js, PowerShell

## Client

A US-based, multi-billion-dollar revenue FMCG company producing and distributing dozens of personal-care brands worldwide. Its focus areas include, among others, feminine, masculine, infant, and pet care products.

## Challenge

The client aimed to automate and facilitate a multi-stage new product development (NPD) process.

The team needed to create an internal management system for NPD. Therefore, they designed a solution covering processes from ideation to quality control. Moreover, the system had to combine data from multiple departments. As a result, it created one easy-to-follow workflow.

To achieve this, the client required the following functional modules to be included in the new system:

- ERP system integration
- A catalog of finished products and components
- A quality assurance and management system
- Automated business processes

Additionally, the team replaced the entire paper-based document management approach with electronic information exchange, including signatures and automatic notifications.

For developing this business process automation system, the client turned to ITSTEADY as [an experienced vendor of custom software based on enterprise-grade Microsoft technologies](/content/about-us/index.html).

## Project

### New Product Development Software Architecture

ITSTEADY’s team completed the project in four months and delivered several web applications on top of SharePoint Online and Microsoft Azure.

The project started with an investigation into the company’s current NPD business processes, which allowed the team to design the architecture for software capable of facilitating those processes. Then, together with the client, the team considered breaking the project into a few solutions, each wrapped in a separate web application.

### New Product Development Software Implementation

The team chose [SharePoint](https://www.microsoft.com/en/microsoft-365/) Online for the system UI. Additionally, it built notifications, templates, and automated workflows on top of SharePoint Online Workflows and Azure Apps, while ensuring system security through Azure AD and OAuth 2.0.

As a result, the team automated the NPD process end to end by delivering the following modules:

- A catalog of components and finished products
- Multi-stage automation of the new product approval workflow
- Notifications
- ERP integration

### New Product Development Software Team & Process

Considering the complexity of processes, with several departments engaged simultaneously, ITSTEADY’s team could effectively enable multiple user roles, in accordance with the project stakeholders’ vision.

Furthermore, the project was delivered by ITSTEADY’s team of one project manager, one business analyst, two full-stack developers, one SharePoint developer, one test engineer, and one SharePoint ICT administrator. As the system was crafted from scratch and required flexibility in its development, the team chose Agile methodology with 2-week iterations.

## Results

In four months, the client’s engineers and servicing teams went from paper-based, manually handled NPD processes to the fully automated new product development and management system with electronic document exchange.

To implement the required functionality, ITSTEADY developed a few web applications with further integration into the existing ERP system. As a result, sustaining more than 30 concurrent users, the new software enables a dozen access levels, supports more than 100,000 components in the catalog, and is capable of processing as much as 500Gb of data.

The project became a significant milestone for both the client and ITSTEADY’s team. The team achieved all goals in full and met the deadline. As a result, the project marked a successful collaboration between the two companies.