Flynn Companies
About the client
With 35 locations and thousands of employees in the field, across North America, this building solutions firm needed to simplify how to share information throughout the organization. Itergy provided a customized solution, based on SharePoint and Power Platform, that provided value Flynn hadn’t even dreamed of.
Challenges
Flynn had been using a Microsoft SharePoint on-premises intranet solution for a long time. They had combined it with a forms and workflow solution to automate processes, but this had created a complex environment that was difficult to maintain, support and adapt. Struggling to find the information they needed, and to access it via their mobile devices, field employees requested the material, instead of searching for it themselves. Business units, therefore, tended to use network storage to manage their documents, making intranet content outdated, and employees even less likely to look for information there. The whole system was inefficient and resource-intensive. Alan Zych, Director, Mobile and Web Applications, knew SharePoint Online was the first step to enabling easier access from anywhere, and that it would also eliminate the need to manage infrastructure and data storage. However, he wanted to understand better how they could leverage it to improve their processes while ensuring that a potential move to the cloud was quick and low stress. Alan requested a Customer Immersion Experience from Microsoft. Due to his previous experience with SharePoint, he did not want to meet with a vendor that would show him what the platform could do in general terms. He wanted to understand more precisely how SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 could be used to spearhead various initiatives within Flynn.
Solutions and Benefits
Itergy’s presentation to Flynn showed the company that they would be in good hands. “There was no smell of BS,” affirms Alan candidly. “After a while, you know when people are straight with you or not. Itergy knows what they’re talking about, they know what’s possible, they know what the limitations
are. Pairing the Microsoft roadmap with a team that understands it and can adapt to it is very valuable.” Itergy used their JumpStart methodology to conduct workshops on the ‘art of the possible,’
that involved various teams, ensured the different needs and requirements were identified and validated, and helped scope out the project. “Once people know what’s possible, then they can say what they want to do with it,” explains Alan. Consequently, Flynn’s original plan to migrate their current on-premises intranet to the cloud platform, SharePoint Online, improving its structure and enabling easier access, was augmented. As well as individual intranet sites for each business unit, that give users easy access to the full breadth of services and support the business unit provides, personalization features were added to enable a custom view based on users’ behaviour. They can also pin links from a service catalogue to both external web applications and intranet resources they use frequently. Front-line workers, who use information distributed by Flynn’s Operational Excellence [OpEx] team, can select the categories of information they are interested in, so the department’s hub shows what is relevant to them. Microsoft Stream also allows the team to share product training videos with field employees, more securely and seamlessly than before.
For Finance, who struggled with the yearly budget process due to the distributed structure of the company [35 sites], workflows were created to automate operations. Budget sheets can be automatically set up and sent via actionable emails, allowing recipients to approve directly in the email, and reminding them automatically when they do not. Approval workflows and a central dashboard allow Finance to track and adjust where necessary. Finally, to ensure efficient use of Microsoft Teams, a process was developed to submit and manage requests to create new teams within the software.