Background

Coles Group manages many large capital and maintenance projects at any one time, and they had tried various off-the-shelf project management tools, with some degree of success, but they were frustrated by the time and cost in having the various products customised for their particular needs.

Eventually they decided to build their own system, to meet all their current and changing needs.

Key Success Factors

The application needed to cope with some quite complex tasks, yet it needed to be as easy as possible to learn for the hundreds of users.

The majority of those users only needed a small proportion of the features. Other users required them all, and the challenge was to arrange the application's layout, navigation and flow (its information architecture), to make the common tasks the most visible and obvious, while having a logical path to the more complex and less-used tasks.

Security was very important, where certain groups/users needed to be able to see and edit only particular brands' data, and also within that data, some data needed to be available only to certain roles based on the status of the project, or the type of data.

The Solution

The solution called OPENstore was born. Much effort was put into the information architecture to cope with the complexity of tasks and the relatively deep data structure (eg. States, Stores, Parent Projects, Child Projects, detailed project information, project change history).

Role and user based security was implemented, where role-based is the default and rights are assigned to roles, but there is also flexibility to modify the rights for a particular individual as required. Users are able to create their own complex project filters, so they can have several views of the projects that are of importance to them.