Microsoft Flow – BRINGING TOGETHER TOOLS TO CREATE FLOW IN PROCESS, WITH USER SATISFACTION IN MIND

A medium sized manufacturing company has 20 staff onsite at its Melbourne based office. The manufacturing facility is located in China, with 30 staff.

Challenge
While the manufacturer was already using Office 365 as their email platform, they were handling production jobs and other business processes by exchanging emails with all relevant documents attached. This made business processes time consuming and inefficient:

• Made it difficult for management to follow the progress of jobs
• Employees were swamped with email and wasted time searching for relevant emails, then reading and writing responses. 
• Business critical documents including CAD drawings, design documents and Excel sheets were stored shared folders and were attached to emails making it very difficult to find, update and maintain documents. 
• Access to the most recent version of documents was not easy, and no version history was available. 
• Payroll, Finance, and HR processes took time from employees and admin staff. 

They needed an advisor to take their processes, improve them and then implement the processes for them in Office 365.
  
Solution

ITswitch’s business analysts reviewed the manufacturing firm’s business workflow and took into consideration the different needs they had to improve their processes.

Utilising cloud-based Microsoft Flow, we were able to automate the business tasks and processes, starting from sales leads going through product engineering, estimating, detail design, etc. to manufacturing.

SharePoint was integrated to store documents, removing those from individual desktops and emails. Microsoft Teams was implemented as the key business collaboration tool and email. Channels in MS Teams were used to organise projects or products, making Teams and SharePoint a central portal for their business.

Human Resources workflows were also implemented in Flow and SharePoint, making the processes easier, quicker and standard. Flows were used to initiate onboarding processes and approval requests.

Benefits
Visibility to the status of manufacturing jobs is increased for staff, and access to the most recent data has improved, leading into increased productivity. Customers now benefit a faster response to their enquiries.

MS Flow implemented for HR and payroll helped automate repetitive and manual tasks. Now employees can make the requests easier while admin staff spend less time on manual tasks and are able to fulfil requests much quicker.