Creating and Implementing Application Security for one of the Fastest Growing Retail Stores in the US

Client’s Background:

Our client, founded by two chefs, searched for a solution to quality, wholesome food.  In 2003, they bought a convenience store near Boulder, CO which effectively launched the specialty grocery store chain focused on natural, organic and locally-grown products.  With its tag line of “organic for the 99 percent,” our client has seen a significantly accelerated growth in the last few years and currently employs over 1,800 associates in 13 states throughout the Midwest and the Southeastern United States.  

Problem:

With new stores opening weekly, our client faced challenges managing the local stores to keep up with their expansion.  They lacked centralized document storage and management system and their small in-house IT team found it difficult to provide support for the individual stores running on local computers and network drives.  Without a unified collaboration platform, documents were being shared between headquarters and the individual stores via emails making the process cumbersome and inefficient.  Revision control, document searching, and security proved to be a constant challenge and staying current with employee information in high-turnover job functions quickly became unmanageable.  Ongoing documents like timesheets were being recorded manually making the system archaic and unproductive.  Overall, their systems and processes were unable to keep up with their operational needs and they needed to quickly find a solution.

Result:

Speridian created a customized SharePoint Online portal with a modern design and interface for optimum user experience.  With visualizations, Regional Spotlights, Quick Link icons and more, the portal allows for ease of use for non-technical team members.  The platform also has a responsive design and allows users to access from multiple devices, including mobile and tablet, making the solution more convenient. 

Speridian consulted with business users to map out a well-defined security structure, taxonomy, and document management capabilities for inter and intradepartmental document management and collaboration.

Specific requirements and permissions for users were created based on their role.  For example, the operations team could now oversee each of the regions and all the respective stores through the portal.  The regional directors, however, were only given the permissions that allowed them to best manage the stores within their region.  The individual store directors only needed access to the local store they were managing so their access was limited to what was necessary.  Speridian created a basic structure for the site and a permissions matrix to maintain consistency across the different logins.  With permissions in place, Speridian created a system of document libraries so that our clients could now manage and share pricing sheets, daily offers, reports, and inventory records quickly and with ease. SharePoint is now the primary document and collaboration management system for our client. Without having to email different versions back and forth, the company now has proper document versioning as well as a secure location for all their content.  As a nationwide company, the stores can now work collaboratively in real-time and take advantage of unified document storage, retrieval, searching and security platform. Today, all of our client’s users have adopted their SharePoint portal, which is called “The Vine,” and now run on a modern system that not only allows them to work efficiently but helps drive company growth by streamlining their processes for expansion across the states.