JIRA connecting people

Thesis for Atlassian Summit 2012: extending and customizing JIRA for new use cases

Last year we were working on a project of business process automation for one of the largest Nokia service center in African region.Company consists of: 1 service center, 3 warehouses and 3 customer care centers, about 200+ employees and 100+ repair requests per day. Building Babylon tower was very close to the workflows of the phones repair processes.

The main problem was not the paperwork or lack of automation, but communication between different teams, traceability of events and easeof data retrieval for business decision-making and management. The other side was that the solution had to be delivered at lowest costs possible and within 2 months.

We all know that Jira is the best solution for agile teams, helpdesks, tracking and reporting, but is it possible to be used for warehouse automation? Sure it is! Because Jira’s highly flexible architecture allows customization of user interfaces and creation of custom plugins to make the solution of almost any complexity.

Assuming that phone repair is a Jira issue, easy Jira customization allowed us to solve most of the issues except very important ones – communications between:

• technicians and warehouse teams: howto report required spare parts? Which warehouse stores them now?
• customer care and technicians team: what is the cost of repair? What is the status of the repair? Is the repair completed?
• customer care and end-clients: report that device is ready and repair status check;

For warehouse automation integrated with Jira we’ve developed our own plugin “JIRA Warehouse AutoMate Plugin”. This Plugin makes the management of warehouses much easier, automating the whole life cycle of a warehouse unit within the Jira issue; control stock balances. New items can be added in shortest time - right from the barcode scanner into the Jira system. This solution solved lots of issues for the tech and warehouse teams, as of now they have clear understanding on who and when ordered parts, the price of the repair and the spare parts delivery status.

Another issue was that end clients should have the ability to track the repair status. To solve this we have made 2 tools:

• Web-service to check the phone repair status integrated with Jira via corporate website;
• Polon Tech Jira SMS Plugin to report that the phone is repaired;

Cost-efficient automation solution that we created helped a lot in building better teamwork and communication. The clear understanding of every repair phone issue workflow plummeted down the time of decision making when the problems appear. The issue can be easily reassigned to the team that is responsible. The ability to see how the process is going enhanced teams motivation, productivity, efficiency and KPI by providing pull reports for easy analysis of the work of particular employee and the whole team. Order tracking status and SMS notifications greatly increased customer loyalty with faster service. And in the end the management is very happy with great tracking and reporting tools.