How Dresser Natural Gas Solutions powers process visibility and savings with no-code automation

Jen Pham00:03

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're dialing in from, and welcome to day two of PEX Network's BPM Live 2020 online event. I'm your host, Jen Pham. All sessions are fully interactive, so please ask our speakers as many questions as you like.

Jen Pham01:20

Next up, we have a case study from Dresser Natural Gas Solutions on how they're powering process visibility and savings with automation, brought to you by FlowForma. Today we have Imelda Bettinger, SharePoint Developer at Dresser Natural Gas Solutions, who has 23 years' experience with SharePoint and other web development tools for large corporations, and Shay O'Connor of FlowForma, who has over 25 years in the tech sector.

Shay O'Connor01:50

Thank you, Jen, and thank you everybody for joining. Today is a chat between myself and Imelda about Dresser Natural Gas Solutions' direct experience of digitizing and automating its processes. We'll start with a few questions and get some direct answers from the person who's been through it.

Shay O'Connor02:38

Imelda, for anyone who may not know Dresser Natural Gas Solutions, can you give us some background on the company and your role?

Imelda Bettinger02:52

Dresser Natural Gas Solutions is a Houston-based natural gas company. We create meters, instruments, instrumentation and piping solutions for the natural gas industry. We've been around for about 120 years and started in Bradford, Pennsylvania. We've been bought and sold by many companies, but we're now independent, and we're taking on new technologies to help build our business.

Imelda Bettinger03:21

I'm a SharePoint web developer and administrator. I work on SharePoint and Office 365 solutions, help and support, and reporting, particularly with Power BI. I've used SharePoint since day one, across the financial, oil and gas and health industries, and seen it evolve from the early on-premises versions to Office 365, which gives you far more scalability and cloud redundancy.

Shay O'Connor04:36

What challenges did you face that motivated you to look at a process automation tool?

Imelda Bettinger05:00

When I joined Dresser about 18 months ago, we were in the middle of a divestiture from Baker Hughes GE. We were losing capabilities that sat on the GE network, and we had to replace those processes on our side. Since we'd started rebuilding our IT network on Office 365, that gave me the opportunity to look at SharePoint and third-party tools for workflows.

Imelda Bettinger05:49

We didn't want to just mimic what we had; we wanted to improve on it. There were about four processes in place, they were older, and it took a long time to get any change done. So we sat down with the business and asked: show me what you have, and how would you like to improve it? About 50% of what we created came from what we already had, and we built and improved on that with FlowForma.

Shay O'Connor06:36

Why would changes take so long? Was it red tape, or coding?

Imelda Bettinger06:48

As I understand it, the processes were built in code and took years to build. If our team needed a change, it was a six-month request, and then they'd decide whether to implement it, because it affected the rest of the company using those processes.

Imelda Bettinger07:35

Now that we have our own platform, we like to think of ourselves as a 130-year-old startup. We could come up with new solutions from scratch with newer tools, and FlowForma helped with that because it's much more customizable.

Shay O'Connor08:10

So, having been surrounded by heavily coded legacy systems, you knew what you didn't want as well as what you wanted.

Imelda Bettinger08:22

Yes. With my background, I knew what SharePoint was capable of, and we've built on that and expanded it.

Jen Pham08:46

Time for a poll, so we can understand your requirements. What is your most important requirement for a process automation tool? The ability to automate processes in-house, the speed at which you can digitize processes, integration with other systems, or strong reporting capabilities?

Jen Pham09:16

The majority, almost half of you, chose the ability to automate processes in-house. Integration with other systems came next, and speed of digitizing processes and strong reporting capabilities each took 15%.

Shay O'Connor09:55

You knew you needed to implement new systems in a new environment. What were your requirements when selecting a process automation tool?

Imelda Bettinger10:12

I wanted something we could implement quickly. We installed FlowForma within 30 minutes. It had to integrate with our current systems, and we knew SharePoint and Office 365 would be our platform. I was already training people on Teams and SharePoint, so they'd be familiar with it.

Imelda Bettinger10:58

It had to be usable. I knew I could create workflows, but I wanted business users to learn enough to make changes as they went, so I wasn't constantly making every change myself. FlowForma lets people customize, build and make changes without me needing to be there.

Imelda Bettinger11:22

We also had a time crunch. We only had four to six months to replicate what we had from GE and build our own system before being removed from that network. We needed a tool that was quick to learn and implement. Our first process took about 30 days, and since then we've built processes within two days. Once you learn it, it's a really quick tool.

Imelda Bettinger11:58

And we wanted a company that was really supportive. From the trial onward, you get hands-on help building your first workflow. I learned a ton from the support team, and even today they're quick, easy and responsive, even with us in Houston and them in the UK.

Shay O'Connor12:30

We see that trend often: the first process takes around four weeks because you're getting up to speed with a new way of working. Did users find the next ones made sense once the first was over the line?

Imelda Bettinger13:20

They did. Part of those 30 days was me doing business analysis as well as development, because the team was moving to a new process they wanted to improve. We carried what we learned from the first workflow over to the others, since they were for one department and shared a lot of fields. We used SharePoint lists for lookups, so everything stayed consistent.

Shay O'Connor14:38

And because you build directly in FlowForma, whatever you create is usable. There's no throwaway wireframe or proof of concept.

Imelda Bettinger14:58

Yes. We can show a workflow to another division from a graphical view, and they'll say: we need this piece, or here are our part numbers. We reuse existing workflows. And I can have a business analyst, an engineer or even a document controller take on mapping things out and making changes.

Shay O'Connor16:49

Can you tell us more about the types of processes you've automated?

Imelda Bettinger16:56

We started by replacing four workflows for our manufacturing engineering department. They're mostly documentation: everything in the engineering process has to be documented and approved. Since then, the main users have been coming up with more and more ideas for FlowForma, which is good.

Imelda Bettinger17:30

Our newest process is a customer complaint form. It replaces an existing system, and it's company-wide. It covers two divisions right now, and we'll expand it to the other two.

Imelda Bettinger17:51

We also built an IT change management process. We have a ticketing system, but for bigger projects and for audit purposes we needed a more robust change approval process: which systems are affected, what the changes are, who's approving, and an extra approval if financial data is involved. When it's time for an audit, we run reports in Power BI and give the auditors exactly what they need.

Imelda Bettinger18:39

Another workflow came from most of our staff working from home because of COVID. People had laptops, but not keyboards, mice and monitors. We put together an equipment and software request form, and once it's approved it goes to our help desk and people get their equipment within a day or two.

Shay O'Connor19:27

We've seen the same with other customers. Any process that was verbal or manual broke when people went home, because you can't turn to someone across the partition and ask for a new monitor. With FlowForma you can apply a rule and give it visibility, so people know where they stand.

Imelda Bettinger21:40

It has helped. Some people prefer not to be out in public as much, so they use this tool to request equipment or software instead of walking up to IT.

Shay O'Connor22:45

You mentioned IT change management and audits. The difference between a manual system and a digitized one for audits is immense, because everything's organized.

Imelda Bettinger23:32

Things had been a little scattered. We were using FlowForma, so I brought in IT management and other key people, analyzed what we needed and built it out. It was pretty quick, and it's been working well.

Imelda Bettinger24:21

People also come to me with ideas, and for the most part it's good to see people using the tool, embracing it and coming up with other business ideas for us to build.

Shay O'Connor25:05

You've implemented a good few processes now. What are the outcomes?

Imelda Bettinger25:20

Number one, everything is quicker. Our document controller, who runs most of the meters workflows, had manual processes she kept in a paper notebook, because the GE system wasn't what she needed. We incorporated that into the new system, so she saves about 15% of her time on manual work she doesn't have to do anymore.

Imelda Bettinger26:10

And because it's easy to use, people respond. Before, people didn't want to use another tool, so processes took much longer to approve. Now they're happy to keep SharePoint open, check their task list or respond to an email, and processes move through much quicker.

Shay O'Connor26:45

People often say they hope to achieve efficiency and agility, but your outcomes are very real situations where someone is saving time.

Imelda Bettinger27:05

It's also improving business process times. Some processes could take a month because something was held up, or someone hadn't updated a status, so people chased approvals by email. Now people don't mind using the system, and we track how long processes stay open. If one's taking too long, we can ask why.

Shay O'Connor28:19

That document controller no longer keeps a separate logbook. Nobody would put that on a presentation, but it's a direct impact of digitizing her processes.

Imelda Bettinger29:40

And you can build one section, send it to the manager who requested it and get immediate feedback, as if you're demoing the software live. Then you build the next piece.

Jen Pham29:58

Our second poll: what outcomes would you like to gain from digitizing business processes? Users only see what they need to see, bottlenecks are found quicker, one source of truth, increased efficiency and productivity, or another answer in the Q&A box.

Jen Pham31:00

The majority of you went straight to increased efficiency and productivity, at 77.8%. Bottlenecks found quicker came next, and a small percentage chose one source of truth.

Shay O'Connor31:37

What's next for you?

Imelda Bettinger31:50

We're continuing to build out the customer complaint workflow. It's customized to each business unit, its team members and products, so I'm gathering the data sets for the other two business units, then we'll build, test and roll it out.

Imelda Bettinger32:20

Our pipeline division in Bradford also wants to use a couple of processes the meters division has, so we'll repurpose those. They saw what one division was doing and said: that works, we can leverage it. We add their own data, and they have another workflow.

Imelda Bettinger32:58

We've also started using Power BI. For the customer complaint process, managers wanted reports from day one, so I built Power BI reports on how old a complaint is, which stage it's at and who's responsible. I put that report inside their Teams dashboard, so they don't even have to open SharePoint.

Shay O'Connor33:50

Data validity matters too. Because your digital forms validate the data passed between everyone in the process, your reports are more concrete.

Imelda Bettinger34:15

Exactly. FlowForma sits on SharePoint in Microsoft 365, tied to Power BI, so everything is interconnected and it's exactly the same data. It's a straight feed, not an Excel export with calculations. I was shown reports that took weeks to put together in Excel for monthly and quarterly meetings, and now I can build them automatically.

Shay O'Connor35:40

That's one of the hidden impacts of digitization. Thanks, Imelda, that's been excellent.

Jen Pham36:21

Thank you, Shay and Imelda. We have a few minutes for Q&A. Imelda: our processes often need changes. Could we make those changes in-house with FlowForma?

Imelda Bettinger36:35

Yes. It's all web-based. I do the bulk of the workflow setup, but a number of our business team and engineers have been trained to make their own changes. It depends on the change, but yes, it's certainly possible.

Jen Pham36:58

How long does it take to digitize a process with FlowForma?

Imelda Bettinger37:05

The very first one, with the learning curve and business analysis of the current process, took about 30 days. The most recent one, the COVID equipment request form, took two days. I pulled together what we needed, built it, tested it and launched.

Jen Pham37:35

Shay, could I let my suppliers input into processes digitized with FlowForma?

Shay O'Connor37:45

Yes. FlowForma has a feature called Engage, where you can bring third parties into the same process with no extra learning. You decide a step is for an external user, and whether that's anonymous, for a query or a job application, say, or secured, validating credentials through Google, Microsoft or Facebook.

Jen Pham38:25

Someone has a lot of staff in remote areas. Would FlowForma work for remote users?

Shay O'Connor38:35

Yes. We have many customers with offices in different locations or a spread-out workforce, such as construction projects across sites. Because you've standardized your process on digital forms, you get consistent information no matter where users are.

Imelda Bettinger39:20

That's correct.

Jen Pham39:35

Final question, for Shay: what are the technical requirements for FlowForma?

Shay O'Connor39:48

As Imelda said, she had it up and running within 30 minutes. You need Office 365. FlowForma is an app that sits on top of Office 365, so it takes about half an hour from the store to get running, and you just need SharePoint admin rights. After that you can start creating processes straight away.

Shay O'Connor40:40

If anybody wants to try FlowForma, we can do demos. Once you engage us, we look at what you're trying to achieve and show how FlowForma fits your organization, so you can show the results. Contact us anytime. And thanks to Imelda for getting up early in Houston to join us.

Imelda Bettinger41:30

You're welcome. It's been fun.

Jen Pham41:35

Thank you both for joining us. You've heard how Dresser Natural Gas Solutions works with FlowForma. There's more downloadable content in the resources list. Thank you all for attending.