FlowForma > Case Studies > Fast And Easy Path To New Workflows

Fast And Easy Path To New Workflows

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

FlowForma Process Automation

Tech Stack

Microsoft Office 365
SharePoint
Power BI

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance
Process Control & Optimization

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Dresser Natural Gas Solutions is a leading provider of measurement, piping, and instrumentation solutions to natural gas distribution and transmission customers in more than 100 countries. The company is headquartered in Houston, Texas. When the business was acquired and divested from a larger group, it had a brief window of time to set up its own IT systems. The company needed to migrate legacy document processes that were key to its engineering operations. The company chose Microsoft Office 365 as the platform to begin the rebuild and the FlowForma Process Automation tool as the best application for process automation.

The Challenge

Dresser Natural Gas Solutions, a leading provider of measurement, piping, and instrumentation solutions, was faced with the challenge of migrating legacy document processes that were key to the company’s engineering operations. The company had a brief window of time to set up its own IT systems after being divested from a larger group. The legacy IT platform required replacement and the company had only 4-6 months to deliver a new solution. The old processes were heavily coded and hard to change, which posed a significant challenge. The company needed a process automation tool that could be implemented quickly due to the time constraints.

The Solution

The company chose FlowForma Process Automation as the solution to their challenge. The tool was fully integrated with Microsoft Office 365, including SharePoint, which was used as the company’s document repository. The company built their first workflow as part of FlowForma’s SureStart programme and completed it in 30 days. Subsequent ‘flows’ have taken just two days to build, test, and launch. The priority was replicating four ‘code-heavy’ legacy workflows for the manufacturing and engineering departments, document-driven processes that had a number of approval steps. The goal was a 50/50 split between mimicking old processes and adding new features and functionality. In the case of an IT Change Management Process, the ticketing system FlowForma Process Automation’s fast build proved particularly useful when Covid-19 struck and homeworking became essential.

Operational Impact

Fast deployment, seamless integration with Microsoft Office 365, and ease of use have been the three principal benefits of FlowForma Process Automation.
Changes to documents are made more quickly because end users are comfortable working with a familiar interface in SharePoint; task lists are completed and approval emails sent without people having to be constantly prompted.
FlowForma also facilitates continuous workflow improvement, something that was hard to achieve before.
The impact of FlowForma Process Automation has helped change the culture of the company and given it a fresh impetus.

Quantitative Benefit

The Document Controller no longer has to keep the manual logbooks she used with the legacy processes, record numbers are now auto assigned, saving 15 percent of her time.
Information captured around process changes and approvals are all in one system which makes it easy to generate reports using Power BI.