Document Management and Business Governance with Sharepoint

Our energy client needed to optimize and extend Microsoft Sharepoint to the cloud

A successful migration empowers users with real-time capabilities using Sharepoint

Our energy client initially called upon Chateaux to help support their Microsoft Sharepoint installation. The Chateaux team went on-site to understand the current configuration and usage of the system. While interviewing key stakeholders from various departments, we uncovered several business challenges that showed how Sharepoint was not being used up to its potential. These challenges include:

• HR: Sharepoint was not being utilized, and there were many manual processes; documents were either printed out or stored digitally on an internal shared drive with no versioning, collaboration, or consistent naming conventions which posed challenges during audits; the department was resistant to using any system, and were not incentivized in creating a better solution
• Legal: an internal shared drive was being used to store all records, in place of a proper document management system; 4-5 email inboxes were used to manage email and search capabilities; coordination was lackluster at best; the department was very interested in using Sharepoint and key capabilities such as document management and retention
• Procurement: heavy users of Sharepoint, along with an integration to Nintex Workflows 2013 for managing processes such as new work orders and approvals; the department was not using the solution to the best of their ability and properly, and had issues with easily locating documents within Sharepoint due in part with lack of tagging; there were still manual steps involved, and lacked knowledge of new features within their current solution
• Training & Certification: the business requires their employees to be up-to-date on training and certification, and this information needs to be tracked per employee; their current $15k / year third party solution has not done well in this regard, and the department was interested in migrating their learning management needs to Sharepoint

The Chateaux team had extensive interviews with the company’s departments to gain an understanding of corporate strategy and goals, essential processes and capabilities, and usability needs. This essential information allowed our technical experts to create a prototype based upon Sharepoint 2013 and Nintex Workflows 2013. We demonstrated the following capabilities in real-time:

• A standard definition of common terms for insurance documents, with tagging to enable easy identification of relevant documents
• Custom filtering logic within search, and implemented Google-like search to increase user productivity and e-discovery features
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook calendar to provide management visibility into team calendars and schedules, and utilization of email alerts from directly within Sharepoint to increase response times to workflow actions
• Updated crawling and indexing logic, enabling new documents to be seen very quickly (previously the wait time for new document visibility was up to a whole day)Standardized global site navigation and custom implementation of bread crumbs, to provide a consistent user experience across departments and user roles
• Fine-grained security levels to ensure data separation between departments
• Automation of expense claim processes with a custom user interface, workflows, versioning and export capabilities (previously this was handled with EXCEL spreadsheets and email)

The client was amazed and excited over the possibilities. They recognized some essential business benefits that would be achieved:

• Increased user productivity and collaboration to enable speed to market
• Standardization and automation of business processes across the entire company
• Document governance to reduce risk

USPowergen is a large power generation company that owns and operates 53 power generating units at three facilities with a total average capacity of over 1,900 Megawatts.