One of the requests that we are often called upon to satisfy concerns the automation of internal processes and repetitive activities that, despite being of low added value, involve a significant waste of time, energy and resources. These activities include the management of permit requests. A digitized system reduces the workload associated with collecting, processing and tracking internal requests, while allowing savings in terms of paper and materials consumed to fill out traditional forms. A customer requested the development of this technology. Here's how it went.
With more than 4,000 workers, our customer needed to implement a new system for managing internal requests.
Until then, the company provided a paper form to fill out together with the necessary attachments. The workers then had to print all the required documents and hand them over to their contacts for approval. The documents would arrive at the administration, and then be sorted and stored in the company archives.
Needless to say, this process is obsolete, leading to a series of inefficiencies that are as avoidable as they are harmful to the company:
The customer received more and more negative feedback from workers, especially from those who were responsible for approving the individual forms and related attached documents.
We have therefore designed a new system to simplify the entire process of managing internal requests, with the aim of improving productivity and the quality of work in the company.
We started by digitizing the paper form used to formalize permission requests.
To do this, we created a custom module with Power Apps from the Microsoft Power Platform and made it available to users through a dedicated section of the company intranet.
The form has been configured to accommodate the same information as the paper counterpart, but customized commands have been added to guide users in correctly filling out the individual fields.
This functionality not only reduces the risk of errors due to missing or incomplete information, but it also makes the use of the new digitized form more accessible and intuitive.
The solution was then integrated with a customized Power Automate flow, to automate the approval process. Once the request has been sent, the system then takes care of:
At the end of the approval process, requests are automatically saved to a SharePoint document library.
Enabled users can access the library to organize information and export it to Excel, to analyze the data in detail and understand how to continue to improve the process of managing internal requests based on the needs of colleagues.
Together with the customer, we tracked the number of requests transmitted and approved with the new digital form, to understand if it was really the right solution to improve the employee experience. The answer?
Since our solution was implemented (December 2023), 52 requests have been created.
The company was therefore able to save the paper and the time needed to manage more than 100 documents, coming from more than 4,000 workers distributed throughout the country.
From the start of production to today, the company has not yet received any negative feedback from users.
The Modern Work team effectively and swiftly addresses IT needs, primarily focusing on software development. The technical staff is well-trained in implementing software projects using Microsoft technology stacks and is skilled in managing both agile and long-term projects.
