Introduction – BCM (Business Cost Management)

BCM is a Franchise network that provides Cost Management and Cost Reduction services to small, medium and large organizations around the world. BCM has its Headquarters in Limerick city, Ireland with Franchise offices as far afield as Slovenia, Taiwan, USA, Ecuador and Bangladesh.

Problem – Information Dissemination

As a Franchise operator, BCM must constantly provide valuable services to all Franchisees in order to justify their membership of the Franchise network. BCM provides training material, Q&A sessions and case study documents to aid all Franchisees. BCM was delivering these documents and its services via a manually updated website. The Franchisees could not directly update the website and hence everything had to pass through Headquarters. This was an extremely time consuming process for HQ staff and hence they became a bottleneck as the number of Franchisees grew.
BCM needed a simple online solution to aid in the distribution of corporate knowledge and experience amongst its growing list of Franchisees.

Challenge – Flexible Access Control and Simple Administration

Any new system would need to allow the Franchisees to have direct access in order to add and update their own content along with viewing the content from all other Franchisees. At the same time, Headquarters needed to maintain complete control over what information was added to the system and who had access at any point in time.
Finally, BCM has a public facing website that contains a list of Franchisee contact details and a news ticker with recent BCM news items. This site needed to be directly updated by the system whenever a new Franchisee came on board or a news item was recorded. Headquarters did not want to have to update and maintain two lists of Franchisees and news items (on the public and private sites).

Solution – Private SharePoint Portal and Web Services to Public Site

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was used to implement the private Franchisee community site. We developed a number of ASP.Net 3.5/C# web parts, web pages and event handlers for SharePoint in order to provide the fine-grained security control and simple user administration that was required. The SharePoint site hosts discussion boards, project folders, support documents such as supplier price lists, customer lists and a workflow that all Franchisees can follow to keep their projects on track. It is now the central hub of all activity and information sharing between the Franchisees around the world.
We used the Kentico CMS system to implement the public website. We customised Kentico with some ASP.Net 3.5/C# web controls and Web Services that pull the Franchisee list and news ticker items directly from the SharePoint server. This means that when Headquarters update the set of current Franchisees in their SharePoint user control panel, the list displayed on the public website is instantly updated too.

Technologies

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, ASP.Net 3.5, C#, Kentico Version 4, Web Services, CAML.