Improve project approval process with Kianda forms and workflows
As the engineering and construction industries are changing at a rapid pace, they experience a significant digital transformation in several areas. Digitising business processes is one of the areas that is expected to support companies in enhancing their processes and decreasing costs.
Mercury Engineering is one of the leading innovators in the progressive digitalization in the construction industry. As one of the largest multi-disciplinary engineering companies in Europe, having streamlined business processes is imperative.
Fiona McCabe, IT Lead Business Analyst who has been using Kianda for almost a year, says they introduced Kianda into Mercury to simplify and improve their Authority Matrix process.
“Our Authority Matrix process is an online approval process which is used internally to ensure certain steps have been taken when approving key commercial decisions. Each approval form with its own distinct purpose, involve many people across the organisation, from staff on construction sites to our legal team, right up to Executive Management and CEO.”
Teamwork
The business process management (BPM) solution they were looking to implement had to be easy to use, reliable and accessible from any location, across a range of devices and browsers. Historically this process was conducted via Excel which required manual steps of printing, signing, scanning and finally emailing to the next approver on the list. Very often, with people in remote locations, approval times took too long.
I can’t begin to explain how valuable this has been to have the knowledge and skills myself. Someone nabs me in the corridor and mentions an issue they are having and rather than “Drop me an email, and I’ll log it with the provider” instead now I’m able to ask them real questions, and I’m walking away from a 30 second conversation knowing whether this is something I can address myself or if I’ll need to involve the Kianda team for extra help.
I truly didn’t realise how empowering this really would beFiona McCabe – Lead IT Business Analyst at Mercury Engineering
Key challenges of managing approval process prior to Kianda
Before moving to Kianda, they implemented a different process management solution which did not meet their needs and presented some key challenges such as slow load times, workflows breaking mid process, every issue being outsourced and poor reporting capability. Kianda provided them a solution which could both address these challenges as well as offer extra functionality and capability.
We didn’t want to implement another solution that would need specialists and professional consultancy costs every time something required enhancement. Kianda was an obvious solution. It was low-code and meant I could take on a huge amount of the work myself. I couldn’t believe my luck to discover I could deliver this to the business myself.” adds Fiona.
How Kianda addressed the challenges and offered extra capabilities
Kianda offered a robust business process management solution that synced into their current systems while addressing the challenges. It provided faster load time, easy reporting capability and most importantly ability to bring knowledge in-house to extend and maintain the solution.
80% faster performance
With Kianda, process form loads 80% faster compared to the previous solution. Users start interacting with the approval process either from a link in an automated email notification or from Mercury SharePoint Online Dashboard. From either entry point users are re-directed from SharePoint to Kianda Form. Overall, 75 hours of company time is being saved annually solely from forms loading quicker with Kianda.
Accurate KPI’s via easy to use reporting dashboards – “Reporting is a breeze with Kianda”
Managers have different requirements for reporting – one is concerned with workflows in progress; another is concerned with reviewing the total overall commercials; another manages the entire process and needs a good birds eye view of everything happening with the workflows. The detailed analytics and reports achieved through easy to customise Kianda dashboards has aided productivity for the management team.
“Kianda Dashboards are so simple to create and use. I’ve been able to create individual dashboards for each, personalising the charts and widgets based on their needs. Admittedly, the first one I created did take me a bit of time to wrap my head around it, but then I was flying and was creating custom dashboards in under 10 minutes upon request while the manager stands at my desk telling me what they want! – It sends a really positive message to the senior managers when I can address their requests in house”. says Fiona.
Eliminating emails, calls and paper work
Newly introduced ‘Query’ function within each workflow saves Mercury a lot of time – it allows requestors and approvers to collaborate in a single point. Rather than sending emails or making calls, they can send each other comments throughout the process flow. It’s eliminating multiple emails, phone calls; saving time and phone bills.
Faster workflow development times and in-house control
Because Kianda has been working very well for Mercury, they are now introducing new approval forms in-house. Fiona highlights how fast she can implement a new workflow herself.
“Clone a process already in place, tweak a few little rules to suit the new process, and bam, less than 1 hour of my time and I was issuing a new process for UAT. Who wouldn’t recommend a product that gives you that type of ability?!”94% less project support queries
Mercury IT team is now dealing with only couple of support queries per month related to this particular project.
“I’m based within the Group IT team so while not an end user of the workflows myself, even I experienced a positive improvement as the volume of incidents and issues went from approximately 12 per week to 3 per month. Most of the “issues” we experience are generally the user doing something wrong, or not sure how to use the functionality ” highlights Fiona.
This particular approval workflow project is not the only area where Mercury use Kianda. They also use it to capture health and safety information – this is merely a staff member spots something that health and safety should know about (good or bad) and logs through Kianda. They are also automating their HR employee onboarding and induction process which will be delivered via Kianda to digitise the entire new hire onboarding from HR pre-employment procedures, capturing new hire digital signatures to induction tasks and offboarding.
We had several processes which needed to be automated, transforming from paper into digital, with our staff dispersed across many jurisdictions with many working remotely and on-the-go and a need to support collaboration from laptops, desktops and mobile devices. Kianda’s low-code product was ideal to meet our needs, reduced processing time throughout the company and brought key knowledge in-house recommends Fiona McCabe.
