OREANDA-NEWS. On 06 May 2009 was announced, that "Lenta" trade stores network had commissioned a new corporate intranet-portal*. Works on the project began in July 2008. The portal is one of several major IT projects accomplished by the company in 2008 **

IT director, member of "Lenta" Board of Directors Sergey Cherny says: "Lenta" has always paid proper attention to IT-infrastructure, actively introducing innovations appearing in the market. We plan to adhere to these policies in future. Our experience shows: investments in information systems and modern infrastructure increase overall performance and reduce costs".

Results of introduction of the new intranet-portal are similar. Besides standard opportunities, such as:

• informing employees on events in the compan;

• possibility of viewing photos and video-reports on company's life;

• holding polls and votes, etc.,

The portal allows to optimize the work of employees of various departments.

Experts of client services division and call-centre of "Lenta" answer around 400 calls and 50 letters from buyers each day from at least 17 cities of Russia. As a result of introduction of the Portal, the time for information search, processing and analysis of inquiries has decreased by 40-80 working hours per month. The Portal also allowed cutting temporary costs of the organization related to delivery of large home appliances to buyers and ordering printed materials.

Working through Portal with documents and reports allowed to reduce the time for approvals, significantly decrease the volume of information sent by e-mail, and even the cost of paper. Using the portal at writing reports on stocks saves up to 30 working hours a month, while automation of budget reporting saves 8-14 hours a month. And the company makes dozens of similar reports.

The Portal enables experts of the logistic department to control the vehicles at each of the 9 stages of loading and unloading in the distribution centre. It allows to reveal processes demanding correction and to reduce idle time of trucks. Due to this innovation and exception of idle times, the vehicles on the average spend 30 % less time in the Distribution centre now.

The portal also allows carrying out remote training of employees.

Ultimately, each employee will have a personal page on the portal with data on his/her salary, holidays, results of tests, passed within the framework of corporate training. Integration of Portal with SAP BW database is scheduled for the future, including the work on creation of the extranet-portal. Access to the extranet-portal will be provided to employees and suppliers of the company: partners of "Lenta" will get information on sales of their goods, reports on delivery, being able to exchange various information with the network in real-time.

* based on the platform of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 developed by experts of Finnish company Tieto

** the following modules have been introduced:

• SAP HR module;

• Module on automatic order planning for the Distribution Centre;

• SAP module for transport management;

• Archiving historical data and reorganization of SAP database;

• Service desk technical support system was launched.