Company Background
Kaiser Enterprise, formerly Gallagher-Kaiser, designs, engineers, fabricates and installs large industrial facilities. Its divisions build turn-key paint shops and battery manufacturing plants for automotive manufacturers, as well as hyperscale data centers and wastewater treatment facilities. The group has about 1,900 employees.
Each project needs a large volume of equipment and services, bought from a wide network of vendors. Kaiser already ran its systems on Microsoft Azure and SQL Server, and its staff work in Microsoft 365 and Teams every day.
Challenge
Engineering and operations sent purchase requests to the purchasing team by email or phone. Purchasing then followed up the same way. As project work grew, this broke down:
- No tracking. Requests lived in individual inboxes. Nobody could see every open request, or where each one stood.
- Lost changes. It was easy to miss that a request had been cancelled, or that it was already out for quote.
- No visibility for departments. Requesters had to email or call to find out what was happening.
- Manual cost tracking. Linking purchases to projects and cost codes took extra effort.
Kaiser asked SharpQuest for a solution that worked with Microsoft Teams and tracked every internal requisition.
What SharpQuest Did
- Mapped the requisition workflow with the purchasing team
- Built the Purchasing Portal on Azure and SQL Server
- Added single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID
- Added a Teams tab and notifications in Teams and email
- Tied every requisition to a project and cost code
- Went live in 8 weeks
Solution
We built the Purchasing Portal around how purchasing actually works:
- Submit. Any department creates a requisition in one place, linked to a project and an accounting cost code.
- Triage and assign. Purchasing reviews incoming requests and assigns each one to a buyer.
- Ask for details. Buyers can send a request back to the department for more information, inside the same workflow.
- Cancel. A department can cancel a request, and purchasing is told right away, so no one keeps chasing a quote nobody needs.
The portal opens as a tab in Microsoft Teams, where staff already spend their day. At each step, notifications go to a Teams chat and by email, so people know when something needs them without checking the portal.
Kaiser already ran on Azure and SQL Server, so we built on the same platform: a .NET and C# web application on Azure, with a SQL Server database and a Telerik Kendo UI front end. Staff sign in with their existing Microsoft accounts through Microsoft Entra ID, so there are no new passwords to manage.
The first release, with the core requisition workflow, single sign-on, Teams integration and email notifications, went live in 8 weeks.
Outcomes
The Purchasing Portal went live in June 2025 with a handful of users. By October 2026, more than 80 people across Kaiser’s departments use it.
- 400+ requisitions in 2025, and 2,000+ in 2026
- The monthly average grew from 60 in 2025 to 169 in the first five months of 2026
- The total value of requisitions was up 175% for January-May 2026 compared with August-December 2025
Every request is now in one place, with a clear owner and status. Departments can see where their requests stand, cancellations reach purchasing straight away, and spending is tracked by project and cost code. The purchasing team spends its time on buying decisions instead of chasing emails. SharpQuest continues to support Kaiser as questions come up.
We combined workflow design, Microsoft 365 integration and Azure experience to give Kaiser a purchasing system that fits the tools its staff already use.
