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Client background
Our client, a well-established company in the plant hire industry, employs 320 staff and works with around 2,000 subcontractors. Operating from multiple depots across the UK and Ireland, supporting nationwide projects with over 2,000 operators.
The challenge
The company faced significant inefficiencies in their processes, leading to excessive time spent on routine tasks.
The solution
Pulse – Power Platform adoption framework
Having sustained continued, rapid growth, our client needed to upgrade their internal processes to ensure they could scale effectively. Numerous manual processes and legacy systems were starting to show signs of needing updates and business insights were proving difficult to obtain.
Processes were taking the team too long and human error was becoming a problem, so these inefficiencies needed to be addressed.
Using our 8-week Pulse framework methodology, we guided the client’s team through three key stages: Adoption Planning, Enablement, and Action.
The client has a team of around 2,000 subcontractors who each fill out a weekly timesheet, take a picture of it, and email it into the accounts team. The accounts team then has to read each timesheet and check for accuracy before inputting the data into a separate system. This takes a team of six people 120 hours per week, and costs the business £75,000 per year.
Three people from within the accounts team spent 240 hours per month extracting certain data points from invoices submitted into their team. This process cost the business £37,500 per year. Both processes were time consuming, and prone to data-entry error
When reviewing each project, we were able to establish savings for each process. It was calculated that 86.67% efficiency savings could be realised from each project by introducing Power Automate’s AI Builder and Cognitive Services technology.
By setting data markers on each invoice and timesheet, the AI tech was able to extract this data at the point it was received into a central mailbox. A trigger was then set into motion and the data was collated in a central database held on SharePoint before automatically uploading into a separate system. Within the process, validation rules were built into the flows to make sure any inaccurate or incomplete entries were rejected and shared back to the team for re-submission.
A further development has been scoped to include a mobile Power App for direct timesheet data entry by the subcontractors to further ensure accuracy in data entry, which is a secondary phase of the project.
Through automating a large part of the timesheet reader process and removing the main requirement for manual checking, the client has made a revenue saving of £65,000 per year.
Extracting data from invoices at the point they are received, and sending this data automatically to their existing finance system, has saved the business £32,500 per year.
The combined saving of £97,000 is being allocated within the business to other technology which will further help the client with their ongoing digital evolution.
Business impact: In addition to the savings made, the team of makers are now actively creating Power BI dashboards, Power Apps and using Power Automate for process flow improvement
As well as supporting the client’s development team with the projects categorised for in-house development, we will be working on some strategic deployments over the coming months. Namely, a Power App to reduce the paper forms currently used at the start of the timesheet submission process, a Power BI report which displays live job status information, and a holiday tracker for the resourcing team
Discover more on Pulse – Power Platform Adoption
