Customer Solution Case Study
/ Engineering Firm Speeds Service Requests with Automated Forms Processing
Overview
Country or Region:New Zealand
Industry:Professional services—Engineering and architecture
Customer Profile
Downer New Zealand provides engineering and infrastructure management services in Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific. It employs 3,300 people and has annual revenues of NZ$750 million (U.S.$530 million).
Business Situation
Downer New Zealand merged two divisions and created a shared services department to process common requests. The new group needed an automated electronic-forms processing solution to be effective.
Solution
The company used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to create an automated e-forms solution, which employees in 120 offices use to submit and track forms online.
Benefits
- Faster service processing
- Increased business flexibility
- Better visibility into requests
- Reduced costs
- Reduced costs
Shaun Noick, Business Analyst and Implementation Manager, Downer New Zealand
To support growth in a tight economy, Downer New Zealand, an Australian engineering infrastructure firm, merged two divisions. The organization inherited an inefficient, paper-based service-request system, spread across 120 branch offices, which resulted in lost financial and operational requests, inconsistent processes, no audit trail, extra work, and extra cost. Downer New Zealand initiated a shared-services project centered on an automated e-forms processing system using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. The solution—created in just three months—standardized and sped up financial transactions by 300 percent, enabled the firm to grow faster, and gave visibility into services for continuous improvement. A specialized team processes all service requests now, for an annual staff savings of NZ$2.4 million (U.S.$1.7 million).
Situation
Downer New Zealand is one of the largest New Zealand companies that provides engineering and infrastructure management services to public and private transport, energy, infrastructure, communications, and resources sectors across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the Asia-Pacific region. Downer New Zealand employs approximately 3,300 people and has annual revenues of NZ$750 million (U.S.$530 million).
In early 2010, two divisions, Downer EDi Works and Downer EDi Engineering, merged into a single organization. The primary objective of the merger was to develop and implement an operating structure that supported efficient, shared operations, sustainable growth, and faster delivery of services to customers.
Prior to the merger, key financial-service transactions such as asset disposal requests, capital expenditure requests, equipment maintenance and setup requests, and invoice requests were handled using paper forms, with administrative and finance personnel performing the same tasks on an infrequent basis in 120 branch-office locations. Requests took two to five days to process because they often got lost or stuck at multiple physical approval points. There was no audit trail, and employees were frequently frustrated by delays. As a result, they sometimes skirted the proper procedures, choosing instead to move equipment around or make a repair and wait for the paperwork to catch up later. Management had no visibility into what was going on with key business processes—how long service requests were taking, whether equipment repairs were excessive in one part of the business, where operational problems were creating customer satisfaction problems, and so forth.
”We had many variations in the way our financial transactions were processed across our divisions, and because of the variations, there were mistakes, inconsistent interpretations of policies and regulations, and lost time,” says Shaun Noick, Business Analyst and Implementation Manager for the shared-services project at Downer New Zealand. “The process variation caused a lot of pain at the end of every month when we rolled up our financials. The extra work created overhead that our businesses had to manage.”
Downer New Zealand wanted to standardize on a single process and transactional entity for the entire company, which would make operations more efficient, and also make it easier for the business to grow. “When we made a large acquisition, we had to integrate multiple business processes,” says Chris Milne, Project Manager for the shared-services project at Downer New Zealand. “For example, we had about nine different variations of setting up a new customer.”
After the merger, Downer New Zealand created a new Finance and Administration Shared Services department, which moved service-request processing from 120 branch locations to one central staff of 10 people. However, centralizing request processing was only the first step. Downer New Zealand also needed a technology solution for digitizing and automating these processes—one that would replace paper forms with electronic forms, institute automated workflows to efficiently route forms through review cycles, and provide management with a digital dashboard for viewing the status and health of key business processes.
Solution
Management gave the IT staff an aggressive timeframe of a mere three months to come up with a process automation solution, using the company’s 12 most-used forms as the basis of a pilot project. Downer New Zealand issued a request for proposals to several IT consulting firms and selected Enlighten Designs, a leading New Zealand software development specialist. “We selected Enlighten Designs as our electronic forms project vendor because of its demonstrated technical experience, enthusiasm, and ability to deliver this project on a very tight deadline,” says Milne.
Enlighten Designs proposed using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 information-gathering program as the basis for delivering the smart-forms solution. “We highlighted how a Microsoft-based solution using Office InfoPath and supplemented by Microsoft .NET development would deliver a best-of-breed solution,” says Damon Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of Enlighten Designs. “By using Microsoft software, we could deliver a solution that was both robust and flexible, was proven, and was backed by Microsoft and the enormous Microsoft Partner community.”
Plus, Downer New Zealand already licensed Office SharePoint Server and Office InfoPath, so there would be no extra software licensing expense involved, and the internal IT team knew the products. “We had only about three months to get the solution implemented, and with Office SharePoint Server and Office InfoPath, very little custom work was required,” Milne says. “Enlighten was fantastic to work with. They understood what we wanted and the timeframe we had to meet. We gave them plenty of challenges, and they rose to meet all of them.”
Development Efficiencies
With two weeks reserved for implementation, Enlighten had just 10 weeks to deliver the solution with the initial 12 forms, some of which had very complex workflows. Several forms had as many as seven different people who had to accept or reject the requests. “We used the built-in workflow capability in Office SharePoint Server and used Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize the workflows to the customer’s needs,” says Alex Taylor, Lead Developer on the Downer New Zealand project at Enlighten Designs. “We created a tool for cutting and pasting SharePoint files between the staging and production environments, which really sped our development. We also created a feature that allowed a form to be sent back through the workflow after it had been rejected.”
One major requirement was that the solution be web based, so Enlighten used InfoPath Forms Services in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to give Downer New Zealand employees access to the electronic forms through a web browser. Enlighten developers modified Office SharePoint Server to place Approve and Reject buttons inside the InfoPath-based forms. By the end of March 2010, three months after the project’s start, Enlighten delivered the solution to Downer New Zealand.
Smart Forms with Automated Workflows
With the new electronic forms system (simply called e-forms internally), the Finance and Administration Shared Services department was able to swing into action and bring new levels of efficiency to the company’s key business processes. It brought order and consistency to previously fragmented processes and transferred much of the management work from the field offices to this centralized group of 10 people. Anyone in the company can still make a service request by filling out the appropriate online form, but now only Finance and Administration Shared Services department processes the forms. “These 10 people are highly specialized and can process these transactions far more efficiently than can dozens of other employees working independently around the company,” Noicksays.
The smart forms are available to all staff members over a browser and soon will be accessible by smartphones. The forms have been designed to be easy to complete and process.
The IT team can centrally manage changes to the forms, and the management team has full visibility into the status of all requests and a full audit history. Employees submitting forms also have visibility into the status of their requests. Using a browser-based tool, they can see a list of all the forms that they have submitted, which stage each request is in, and, if a request is delayed, which individual is holding up the review. If an approver does not review or reject a request within eight hours, the initiator receives an email message telling them of the holdup so that he or she can take action.
Enlighten met the deadline of digitizing and automating the initial 12 forms, and now Downer New Zealand is moving ahead to digitize another 100 business processes and add them to the system.
Benefits
With its electronic forms solution, Downer New Zealand has been able to dramatically speed up its internal business processes, grow faster, give employees better visibility into the status of service requests, and reduce operational costs.
Faster Service Processing—Up 300 Percent
The introduction of the Finance and Administration Shared Services department and electronic forms has transformed the way Downer New Zealand operates. “The project has significantly enhanced forms processing productivity,” Milne says. “We have received positive feedback from employees regarding the ease with which requests can be submitted and processed.”
It takes just a few minutes to fill out an e-form, rather than the two hours it took before, because the e-forms provide automatic population of data from line-of-business applications. “We can now provide an eight-hour turnaround on all e-forms versus the two to three days that it took before,” Noicksays. “The Finance and Administration Shared Services team members don’t have to go out and search for information; it’s right there at their fingertips.”
The faster forms processing time is also due to higher data accuracy. Whereas forms processing staff used to deal with handwritten information that was often illegible and incomplete, today, data is typed and often automatically filled from other applications.
“Without the smart forms solution, I doubt that the Finance and Administration Shared Services department would have succeeded,” Milne says. “Enlighten Designs delivered highly usable forms that have had wide acceptance among our staff, which has varying degrees of computer literacy.” For example, when the solution went live, the Downer New Zealand chief financial officer received 20 approval requests before he had received training on the e-forms solution. Within three minutes, he had approved all of the requests waiting for his approval. “He then told his executive assistant that she needed to immediately transfer all paper requests to the new electronic system, because he would no longer approve paper-based requests,” Milne says.
Increased Business Flexibility
Downer New Zealand also has removed one of the procedural barriers to growth with its e-forms solution. “We have an appetite to grow, and one of the key means for growth is acquisitions,” Noicksays. “When we acquire a business, they can assume our processes much more easily. In the past, we would have had to assign a quarter or half a person to manage those additional transactions. Now we only put one more person in the Finance and Administration Shared Services team versus maybe 20 in the field.”
Better Visibility into Service Requests
Additionally, Downer New Zealand now has a central repository and audit trail of all service requests. Managers can easily create reports showing the volumes of different types of requests and the status of all forms in progress. This helps the staff make proactive decisions that can prevent holdups that would impact business productivity and service delivery to customers. “In the past, employees would sometimes say that they had completed and mailed a form, but we had no proof,” says DianeMascelle, Business Representative for Downer New Zealand. “When they complete an e-form, it’s recorded and visible. People in the business appreciate that they have documentation of forms they’ve completed.”
Management can look at its transactional processing records more strategically with this digital record. “We now have great visibility into how many service requests come in each day, where they are in the process, and what kind of service levels we’re delivering,” Noicksays. “The ability to see our service transaction volumes at any given time enables management to make better decisions. We can see the highs, lows, and overall trends so that we can allocate more processing people during peak times.”
Reduced Costs
By automating routine business processes, Downer New Zealand was able to drive overhead costs out of the business by having a team of 10 highly trained individuals handle service request processing, rather than the dozens of employees previously involved in these processes. ”We were able to realize a $2.4 million annual staff savings,” Noicksays. “Plus, the employees who are processing requests are able to add much more value to the company because they’re not wasting time chasing down correct information and fixing errors.”
For the IT staff, the selection of a Microsoft-based solution enabled it to avoid adding complexity to its infrastructure while more fully using existing infrastructure and licensing investments. Also, Downer New Zealand has been able to eliminate paper from its service flow. “With e-forms, there’s no paper printed anywhere along the chain, which reduces costs,” Milne says. “We don’t have to print, file, and store it, which is a big environmental benefit.”
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