ECM & SharePoint Community Blog
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March 21, 2013 - 7:39 PM
You are a major transport provider in Australia, carrying 15 million plus passengers a year. You have well over 1,000 employees and almost 100 operating sites. Every member of your workforce applies for leave approximately three times a year – each time completing a paper form which takes 1.5 hours (on average) to complete the approval cycle.
9,000 company hours spent endorsing workers to spend time away from the business! Or – as we calculated for our client – somewhere in the vicinity of $500,000 per year.
It’s an all too common situation, faced in some measure by every organisation in every industry. No business is immune to these lost hours of productivity and the associated costs.
Streamlining business processes through SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath is one of the simplest, most effective ways to eliminate these issues – and will result in drastic increases in productivity for your business.
By integrating InfoPath forms with SharePoint you can set a dynamic process in motion and keep each individual form moving towards resolution. No more bottlenecks, duplicates, lost forms, printing or storage costs – just a seamless end-to-end workflow that is 100% traceable at all times.
The client we outlined earlier is a prime example. Their business had an internal mandate to automate many of their forms and workflow processes and, after we helped them to evaluate a number of forms, several HR forms with a combined access rate of 10,000 per year were prioritised.
We set about constructing an intricate approval hierarchy that would keep each form moving forward and eradicate the operational delays being experienced. This involved accessing external line of business systems to query the approval hierarchy and using this information to build dynamic form and workflow controls. The way in which controlled documents were revised, converted to PDF and published was also critical. Ultimately, we automated the forms in a way that enabled the client to govern and control them within their own operating environment.
The resultant savings of half a million dollars a year speak for themselves. However the added bonus is that the workflows removed an entire layer of work for several employees, giving them the ability to invest their time in other areas.
When it comes to eating away at productivity and profit, HR forms are certainly not the only culprits. There are any number of operational processes within your business which could be dramatically improved and optimised through an automated SharePoint workflow.
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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
