PPG delivers line-of-business information with K2

PPG, a global supplier of paints, coatings and specialty materials, wanted to more effectively manage 3 terabytes data across 436,000 SharePoint sites and 12 million files in five regions. The company sought a solution to extract and deliver line-of-business information to the right people at the right time.

The corporate IT team was responsible for everything involving SharePoint and had to create many business process automation applications to help different business segments see how they could create value-added solutions that are cost-effective and could boost productivity.

Diane Kallet, senior project manager for corporate IT at PPG, says, “K2 was such a broad platform when we purchased it in 2011. We did evaluate other platforms, and the reason we chose K2 was because of the breadth of the platform. You’re not limited to just SharePoint—if we wanted to use K2, or SmartForms, but didn’t want to use SharePoint in the mix, we could do that. Other workflow tools really just sit on top of your SharePoint infrastructure, but K2 has its own infrastructure and servers. We liked that.” Many departments in PPG have adopted K2, including the following lines of business:

• Finance is using K2 in its authorization for its capital transaction (ACT) system and for managing representation letters.
• Quality Assurance use K2 for project management and document management.
• Architectural Coatings uses K2 through IT ticketing, consumer refunds, warranty requisitions, master data management and IT.

  Kallet says, “We are looking into migrating from SharePoint 2010 to either SharePoint 2013 or the next iteration of SharePoint released by Microsoft. We are on premises and plan to continue to stay on premises—we have security and service concerns that will keep us on premises—as well as staying with K2 software.”

  (Image courtesy of ShutterStock.com)