Situation Assessment

Established in 1939, Dollar General has grown to become the nation’s largest small-box discount retailer with 8,000 stores, 71,500 employees, 9 distribution centers, and over $9.5 billion in sales in 2007. As the company has grown, the need to efficiently present vast amounts of current and accurate information to customers, employees, vendors, service providers and stake holders has become a challenge.  Dollar General‘s business demanded a single enterprise-wide platform for streamlining control of company marketing and corporate content.

Initially, the solution required a complete redesign of the corporate website to present a fresh new design by Dollar General’s design partner. The timing for publishing the site’s marketing content was critical and required verification that all content was accurate and up to date before being made available for public access. With the current website solution, adding or revising site content was a slow process involving multiple resources and requiring content changes to be scheduled in advance and involving a technical resource. Not only was the new site expected to meet Dollar General’s updated marketing design vision, it also needed a streamlined collaboration and approval process for the new content from multiple contribution sources. The platform would also be required to scale as the site’s traffic increased with marketing initiatives scheduled for the upcoming year.

Solution Overview

After an evaluation of Microsoft’s latest SharePoint release, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) was found to be an ideal solution for Dollar General’s initial and long term goals. The out-of-the-box content management functionality allowed a streamlined workflow process for multiple contributors to update site content on the authoring server while a formal content approval process formally verified and approved the content before it was moved to the live website. An initial content deployment feature allowed Dollar General to schedule the latest site updates to be deployed at regular strategic times of the day.

As a Gold Certified Partner, Risetime served as the full service solution provider for Dollar General’s SharePoint rollout, assisting with capacity planning, system design, development, rollout, training and support. Risetime also worked directly with Dollar General’s design firm, ARS eCommerce to ensure interface design would translate efficiently to SharePoint’s content management structure.

During the project development, Risetime created the new site structure on the SharePoint platform, customized web parts to enhance their functionality, and integrated the html delivered by ARS. In addition, the site content was migrated from portions of the existing web site. After conducting a training session, Dollar General used SharePoint to create additional pages, add new content, and facilitate the contribution and approval of content from several marketing firms to prepare for site launch. After going live with the new solution, Dollar General’s marketing department continued to use SharePoint to allow complete control of the contribution, approval and publishing of site content without the need for technical support from their internal IT department or outside technical consulting firms.

Because Dollar General expected to leverage SharePoint for future Intranet and Extranet solutions, training and experience received by Dollar General on the platform greatly increases company-wide adoption speed for future SharePoint-driven solutions.

Value Measurement

Although the initial solution focused on the public facing Internet site, the implementation of an enterprise-wide Content Management System and the additional SharePoint processes and functionality has offered the following notable benefits to Dollar General:

• Streamlined control of site content, pages and files by internal departments.
• Established workflows and department processes for contributing new content for the website.
• Created audit process tracking to log the owner and time of each website change.
• Decreased reliance on the internal IT staff and expense for outside technical consulting.
• Decreased concept to publication timeframes, allowing for increased effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
• Decreased time for future adoption and training time for Intranet, Extranet and workflow solutions.
• Decreased labor and expense for future hardware scaling for accommodation of traffic and site usage increases.

To find out how Risetime can bring exceptional results like these to your business, contact us.