Bitrix24 implementation

Aim

To set up an integrated space for information and communication so that the staff should have a place where they can interact and teach one another for the licensee companies of the Respect trademark.

What we’ve done

Within the framework of the project we have set up the corporate portal, performed training of the company personnel and put into practice several operating scenarios to optimize the workflow of geographically dispersed retail company:

1. Stores opening

Basing on the standard tools we created automated tasks with template checklists. The user can easily customize the number and content of the listed items.

Every day all store managers receive the task to open their stores with the "Shift opening" checklist. If a manager checks all listed items, the task gets closed automatically. Deputy managers and store administrators can also work with the task (check the items, place comments, etc.). Performance monitoring is carried out by all superior managers according to the company structure. If there is an unchecked item, the task is marked in red so that the supervisor won't miss it. As for the communication mechanism, there's the possibility to place comments and attach photos to the tasks, and all that can be done using a mobile app.

The tasks configuration is performed in the administrative panel. For instance, one can select the stores to be included in the given functionality, the task frequency, which checklist template to use.

2. HR: actualizing employees data

The standard mechanism of employees registration does not work well for the large retail chains due to the weak self-discipline level of the lower staff. Thus, it was important to automate this process: all employees were to be registered, dismissed employees to be automatically blocked and all changes to be reflected in the system. The ideal way was to integrate Bitrix24 with a centralized management system like Active Directory. But in this case, due to the distributed organization and store structure, the integration would not allow us to solve the main problem: the local managers did not have direct access to the centralized system and therefore they had no means to manage employees accounts in a real-time manner.

Hence, we developed a special mechanism for updating the personnel data. It's a much simplified and a more adapted for Bitrix24 analog of a centralized management system.

Store managers are responsible for the primary employee registration process. It's the manager who fills in the employee's card or makes the necessary changes. After the changes were saved, the employee's record is marked in red. Now the record is to be checked by the HR manager, and then all added data is reflected in Bitrix24. It means that the company does not need a system administrator to manage the registration process, it is as automated as possible.

The tasks for managers to update employees data are placed automatically and have a predetermined execution deadline. If the task is overdue, it's marked in red. Therefore, HR managers are able to monitor the whole process. Besides, any store manager can download an up-to-date list of their employees in Excel at any time, and HR managers can do the same for the whole department.

3. Merchandising

For merchandisers, it's extremely important to be able to monitor how the products are laid out in stores and to comment on the layout in real time. To achieve this goal and automate the process we implemented the following scenario: merchandiser from the head office creates a tree of tasks/subtasks in a specially dedicated group following a template City → Year → Month → Week.

Once a week the store manager receives the Week task where he is supposed to create a subtask and attach photos of the layouts. The merchandiser can comment on these photos if necessary.

One of the main advantages of this solution is that instead of hiring merchandiser to each particular store, the company can hire a single employee to work in the office and they will be able to solve the layout errors as soon as they occur all by themselves.

4. Radial tasks

One of the main issues with the standard self-hosted version of Bitrix24 (although it's equally fair for the cloud version as well) is that a huge amount of information indicated in user profiles is not used by the standard means of Bitrix24. For instance, job title is not used by the standard functionality and yet there are routine tasks that might need to be set not only by the company structure but also by the employees' job positions.

Therefore, we have implemented a mechanism that makes it possible to create tasks and automatically assign them to all employees of a certain job title.

For example, an office employee X needs a particular report from all stores of the retail chain. He creates a task template and selects stores that are supposed to receive it. Since the task is intended only to the store managers, each of them will receive their copy of the task.