Voestalpine High Performance Metals Schweiz AG's current complaint management system, centered around Microsoft Access, fails to meet modern standards, resulting in cumbersome and non-automated processes for customer, supplier, and internal complaints. The Project Management Team, as part of Practical Project Work, is charged with the development of an advanced solution. The goal was to provide conceptual guidance and comprehensive information for the further development and possible practical implementation of a contemporary complaint resolution system.

Collaborative discussions with the client led to the mutual agreement that, rather than a real implementation, the development of a conceptual document and a proof of concept would be the result of our project due to time reasons. Iterative meetings and interviews provided a comprehensive understanding of the client's system and points for improvement. The researched best practices in complaint management systems were compiled together with our proof of concept, focusing on a simple interface for complaint entry and a partially automated workflow management.

The project’s first stage resulted in an assessment report of the current system with visualizations of the process landscape. Based on the stakeholder interviews, bottlenecks were highlighted. To create a solid baseline for the new system, best practices of existing systems in similar industries were complied. In addition, the topic of Citizen Development was researched and documented to complement Microsoft Power Automate and Power Apps as proposed technologies. The main deliverable was the concept of the new complaint management system. Different diagrams were leveraged to model all use cases and data models. Multiple technologies were compared to create a proposal on which technology to use. Based on the proposed decisions, the implementation plan was drafted outlining the proposed project scope and objectives, a work breakdown structure, and risk, quality, and change management inputs. With the provided report, voestalpine HPM Schweiz AG will be able to move the project forward and get commitment from management. Additionally, the report provides a good overview of what must be considered when starting the implementation and maintaining a new complaint management system.