Customer Segment: Commercial Property
The Challenge
Our Customer develops, owns and manages commercial properties across Australia while creating outstanding investment opportunities for their investors.
Managing contract documents manually and via shared network folders exposes organisations to misplaced documents, duplication and potential non-compliance with regulations. The cost to organisations of non-compliance is enormous, not to mention the inefficiencies associated with manual processes.
The solution to these problems enables an organization to create, review, collaborate, approve, track, publish, and manage all of your company contracts in one central location, contributing to a compliance culture within the organisation along with improved budget reporting around organisational contracts.
We explored this further and noticed following key problems faced by users involved in the process –
- Contract documents become spread out and are sometimes held within numerous locations – network drives, the intranet, cloud document storage (OneDrive etc.), Email folders etc.
- Review/Approvals are not recorded for future reference purposes
- Lack of notifications and alerts to users for taking actions based on key contract dates
- Lack of integration with organisational line of business application like CRM that can provided enhanced tagging feature
- With no structure in place, searching contracts sometimes is impossible
- No structures limits the security on contract documents leaving organisations at risk of exposing data
- When users are re deployed or leave the organisation, finding the documents that relate to their role in the various network locations, SharePoint libraries and folders becomes difficult
- People then have to ask others where to locate a contract document, eventually become frustrated and then ‘reinvent the wheel’, introducing further complexity.
- Email is the main form of internal (and External) document distribution and many users use their email folders as an informal document management system for contract documents.
- Documents attached to emails create a duplication nightmare as slightly different versions of documents are passed around from user to user causing confusion and slowing down the processes the documents are meant to be supporting.
- Collaboration and communication remain the key areas of priority for these teams considering the information produced is often re-used in various areas of the business supporting architecture best practices.
- There are no custom reports/dashboards around various contracts status like pending tasks, contracts due to expire in 30 days, expired contracts etc
The Solution
The solution was developed as part of SharePoint online. This uses customised interfaces using SPfx and PowerApps modules. It also uses MS Flow to manage the approval process.
SPfx custom interfaces are used for landing pages for different user roles. The information is displayed based on the permission levels inherited from Azure AD.
PowerBI then connects to the data store for reporting
Business Benefits
- The solution leverages organisation’s O365 and SharePoint environment and so no additional product license costs.
- Intuitive and easy to use interface
- Easy management through the lifecycle (workflow) of the contract documents
- Retain approval history along with Document controls
- Control organisational naming conventions
- Capture negotiations and suggestions
- Ready to connect to PowerBI for smart reporting
- Role based portal allowing personalised information
- Allows for integration with third party e-signature products
- Aligned to organisation’s common terminology, processes, templates and standards
- More effective search and retrieval of information
- Ability to apply access and security controls to documents and information
- Retention of intellectual property and quick access to IP developed organisation wide
- Opportunity for standardised ways of working
- Consistency of processes, saving documents etc. across the department and organisation
