When a long-standing customer in the South West changed its business model for commissioning engineering projects, we helped them to automate their new business process.
The driver for this change was the growing importance of smaller capital maintenance works, which had major impacts on customer service levels and the company’s environmental performance.
Nowadays, by far the greatest part of our customer’s £200m/year investment programme is processed, evaluated and prepared via the SharePoint solution.
The old style of managing a smaller number of large projects as individual “islands” was superseded by a production line approach to managing a very large portfolio of smaller works. Applying a consistent and repeatable process to these projects, maintaining oversight and ensuring none fell through the cracks was a new kind of business process, and one which was very suitable for automation.
We developed a workflow-based solution using SharePoint. This platform hosted a range of specialist forms and documents which were necessary to complete at each stage, and were generated automatically where needed. Our approach provided auditable records and supported periodic and ad hoc reporting. Also—crucially—the platform was easy to open up to outside contractors, who no longer needed access to the customer’s internal systems.
The end result was a new level of consistency of approach. Key programme and project information became more accessible to staff, and the system was very popular for these reasons. Especially during later stages of projects, when work was being carried out by contractors, being able to locate consistent documentation in a predictable location was an important influence on efficiency and quality of delivery.
From small beginnings as prototype site on the old “2007” platform, using the tools available at the time, we developed this business solution over several generations, leading to its current successor which is hosted in SharePoint Online using latest tools and technologies.