How the UK's largest road project took the fast lane to process improvement

Oliver00:05

Hello and welcome to OPEX Live 2018, brought to you by PEX Network. I'm Oliver, community manager at PEX Network, and I'll be your host today. Our first session is Learn How the Largest Road Construction Project in the UK Took the Fast Lane to Process Improvement, presented by FlowForma.

Oliver00:24

All our sessions are interactive, with a Q&A at the end, so do stick around. If you have questions during the webinar, type them into the Q&A box at any time and our speakers will do their best to answer them before the session ends.

Oliver00:53

Our speakers today are James Morgan, IT manager for the A14 project, and the team from FlowForma, including Paul Stone. Welcome to you all, and when you're ready, please begin.

FlowForma01:15

Thanks very much, Oliver. We're going to have a case study spotlight with James, IT manager of the A14 joint venture. James, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little about the A14 project and your role there?

James Morgan01:40

The A14 is a great scheme for Highways England, probably the biggest in the UK at the moment: about 31 kilometers of road. Some of it is brand-new road, and an existing road is being widened. I'm the IT manager, responsible for bringing in the systems that enable the guys to go to work and perform their day jobs.

FlowForma02:10

What were the main challenges you faced before digitizing your processes?

James Morgan02:15

The construction industry is probably a little behind the curve when it comes to adopting IT. One of our main challenges was the use of spreadsheets and paper-based processes. Someone going out on site to perform an inspection would take a printed document, fill it in, bring it back, and it would literally sit on top of a filing cabinet until document control picked it up and scanned it. Stuff tends to go missing, and you get inaccuracies in the data.

FlowForma03:02

And I imagine the lack of transparency, or a misplaced paper form, would be a big issue when it comes to audits on a project like this.

James Morgan03:09

A lot of what we do is governed by health and safety rules and regulations, so we need to demonstrate things like inspections, and that permits have been issued correctly with the right data. In some cases we need to retain that information for 70-plus years. So accuracy of data, and being able to put your hands on something straight away without sifting through paperwork, is key to what we do.

FlowForma03:41

And was it a goal of yours to become self-sufficient in creating and maintaining those process flows?

James Morgan03:47

Absolutely. We have a management system with probably about 400 forms and processes, and we were keen to remove IT as the bottleneck to automating them. That's why we wanted a solution that let us pass ownership back to the business, so they can control those processes and build, expand and adapt them as they need to over time.

FlowForma04:22

Once you became familiar with FlowForma, how long did it take you to start delivering new processes?

James Morgan04:28

It was brand new to us, and one of the main reasons for choosing it was the simplicity and the lack of coding. The first process took me about a week and a half to build, but that was more about getting my head around the logic and how to transpose a paper-based document into an automated electronic system.

James Morgan04:56

Since then we've greatly improved. To give you an example, last week I built an ecology site inspection, and it took about an hour and a half from start to finish. Compared with standard SharePoint development, it's much quicker: you can literally do it with the customer sitting next to you.

FlowForma05:25

I believe you took part in our onboarding program. Did that help you get up and running faster than doing it yourselves?

James Morgan05:37

For sure. There would have been a few rabbit holes we'd have gone down without it. Six of us sat in a room with your team, looked at our processes and went through the training manual. I'd been looking at the product for a couple of weeks before that, but things made sense and clicked straight away in that two-day session.

FlowForma06:04

How many people attended that session, and how many do you have building processes now?

James Morgan06:11

There were six of us originally, and we're still at six. We're refining what we do and gradually rolling it out to the business. For example, I'm enhancing our plant management process and handing it over to a champion in that function, so they can maintain and expand it themselves. We control that with a UAT environment, with IT as the gatekeeper making sure everything meets our standards before it goes live.

FlowForma06:55

A question that may be useful to many people attending: did you have your processes mapped before you approached FlowForma?

James Morgan07:07

We have a management system with around 400 processes, including the big hitters, and a bit of a bow wave of people with ideas of what they wanted to do. In the main, they're paper-based processes that we transform and automate.

James Morgan07:32

But the adoption of FlowForma has also given us the opportunity to bring on more processes, because we can do things quicker and without the constraints of IT. The ecology site inspection I mentioned wasn't on anybody's radar. It came out of a corridor conversation: someone complained about their guys being out in the rain, and we said we could build that for them so they could do it on their mobiles.

FlowForma08:02

What other processes are you running on FlowForma?

James Morgan08:07

It's broadening, to be honest. We originally looked at the big hitters, like the materials requisition process and our recruitment process. But we go right from the complex end down to small ones, like a quick form to register visitors attending site, which then gets forwarded to the gateman every day so they know who's attending. So a broad spectrum, from a five-minute job up to the more complex ones that need more analysis and structure.

FlowForma08:50

What was the first process you looked at as a test case?

James Morgan09:03

It was a blend of two: the permit to dig, and the recruitment process we use for subcontractors. The one we actually went live with was recruitment, which worked very well, and it's relevant to a lot of joint venture projects.

FlowForma09:23

How many processes do you now have live or built?

James Morgan09:31

We've got about 24, with more coming on a fairly continual basis. Now the team is more comfortable with the product and understands the analysis we need to do, we're starting to publicize it within the project, so I expect we'll see more and more come in. Ultimately, we'd love to run all of the processes in our management system through it, so we can improve the consistency of data and reporting.

FlowForma10:18

Do you create any of these flows yourself, and did you find FlowForma easy to use?

James Morgan10:30

I've created about a dozen of them. I've done a bit of coding in the past, so the main thing was learning how to position the logic before you put things into FlowForma. After that, it's very straightforward compared with trying to code. And the beauty of it is that you can engage with your customer while you're building, which isn't the same as developing something in a code base and then demoing it afterwards.

FlowForma11:13

Was no code a requirement for the system you needed?

James Morgan11:19

Completely. We started with an Office 365 environment and SharePoint Online, and I had a SharePoint resource, so we began developing some processes, like requisitions and survey requests, in SharePoint. But it soon became clear that, with the number of requests hitting the IT team, we'd need more resources, and the timescales for that sort of development were too protracted. We spent probably a good part of 12 months trying to find the right solution.

FlowForma12:16

Having selected FlowForma, how long does it take you to create a flow now?

James Morgan12:29

It depends on the complexity, but for a medium-complexity process you're probably looking at about a day. We're producing a bit of a bible, so there's consistency on the A14 in things like department colors and reference tables and lists, to maintain data integrity. As long as the paper form exists and the customer has a reasonable understanding of the process they want, we can pretty much turn something around within a day.

FlowForma13:12

You have a UAT environment where you can test and prototype processes before putting them live. Has that been a benefit, with new processes coming in almost weekly?

James Morgan13:32

When we started, we didn't look at UAT, but it soon became clear we needed an area to test things and make sure we were achieving the right objectives. Part of the strategy is to move ownership of processes into the business, so having somewhere they can test and develop with no impact on our live environment makes a lot of sense. It also gives us that gatekeeper role, so people can learn without any risk of doing damage to the live system.

FlowForma14:16

Could you walk us through one specific process, maybe a high-value or industry-specific one?

James Morgan14:36

A medium-complexity one that doesn't sound particularly difficult, but carries quite a lot of value, is site visits. We have five sections across 31 kilometers of road, and a number of people want to visit, whether from the parent organizations or VIPs. People were arriving on site having arranged a visit by emailing someone. But site visits need briefings and PPE, we need to know what work is going on at that site, and we need to balance visits across sections, because loading one section with half a dozen visits affects people trying to build a road.

James Morgan15:27

So we sat down with the site visit admin team, looked at what they were doing, and built a process. Using public forms, people outside the organization can book a site tour, and staff can book internally. The team can use Power BI to see how many visits are happening across the scheme on any given day, check the information in each request, and make sure people, vans and resources are lined up. It may seem trivial, but it has quite a big impact on day-to-day operations, and it's made the process far more efficient.

FlowForma16:25

Would you say one key outcome is the centralization of your data?

James Morgan16:33

One of our business drivers is one source of the truth. In construction, there are lots of Excel spreadsheets and paper forms, and people turn up to meetings with their own spreadsheet, where someone else's interpretation may be somewhat different. We were keen to find a solution that gave us consistent, validated data that we could collect, centralize and report on. It was absolutely fundamental to what we wanted to achieve.

FlowForma17:14

Do you have bigger plans for process automation on the A14?

James Morgan17:21

We've got several hundred processes we'd like to automate. Now we're more comfortable with FlowForma, rather than just dealing with day-to-day requests, we're analyzing the processes that exist to find the high-value ones that can bring real value to the business.

James Morgan17:53

One of the early ones is the permit to dig, which the guys need before doing any work on site. Now that it's a semi-automated process, one of the next things is to tie it into our GIS platform, so they can draw on the map where they're going to dig and remove even more paper. It will continue throughout the life of the project.

FlowForma18:25

How has using FlowForma benefited the A14?

James Morgan18:37

It's enabling us to deliver on one source of the truth: a consistent view of data that we can pull into a central data warehouse, and we're very heavily into Power BI. We were scanning several thousand paper records a week. Our aim is to reduce that, so data comes in automatically, and we can spend more time on the problems rather than housekeeping, understanding whether we're achieving the goals and KPIs defined for the job.

FlowForma19:18

Governance and compliance is something you report on regularly. How easy is it to pull that information for audits?

James Morgan19:42

We're very heavily into Power BI, and the beauty of FlowForma is that the data is pretty much immediately available in our Power BI reports. As an industry we're measured on things like health and safety, accidents and incidents, so that data can be displayed straight away, along with anything around inspections, without waiting for someone to transcribe a paper form or for it to be scanned into a system.

FlowForma20:26

You mentioned people out in the field. You're using our mobile app. How has that benefited your processes?

James Morgan20:42

It makes a big difference. It's a large stretch of road, in some cases completely new, so the guys are working in fields with very little infrastructure around them. Otherwise they'd be filling in a paper form, coming back to transcribe it, and handing it over to someone. Being able to use something out in the field makes a world of difference.

James Morgan21:14

Something fairly trivial that makes quite a difference is plant standing. We've got an awful lot of plant on the job, and a lot of it is hired in. If someone sees a piece of plant standing, they take a picture and upload it with a FlowForma form, which goes to the plant manager, and we can investigate within minutes why it's not being used.

FlowForma21:50

I imagine there isn't Wi-Fi all along the road. Is offline capability a key piece for you as well?

James Morgan22:08

We're literally in fields, not near any population, so realistically we can't put Wi-Fi along the job. Being able to complete a process out in the field without any reliance on connectivity makes a lot of difference. We surveyed 30-odd kilometers of road for 3G and 4G, and it seemed fine, but you can't guarantee it. Knowing they can still complete that information, regardless of what's going on around them, makes all the difference.

FlowForma23:00

Could you walk us through a day in the life of how FlowForma is being used?

James Morgan23:18

A good example is the resourcing process we've developed. If someone needs to bring in a gang or a carpenter, it used to be done with a paper form and sign-off by finding someone, leaving it on a desk, or over the phone. If that person was on holiday, the form didn't get signed and things got delayed.

James Morgan23:42

Now we have visibility end to end. Someone fills in a form, it goes off immediately to the works manager for authorization, they can approve it within minutes, and we can see how long the whole process takes. It shows us where the delays are: are we struggling to resource people, is it not getting approved quickly enough, or are requests not raised at the right time? That's visibility we wouldn't ordinarily have with a paper-based process.

FlowForma24:43

As a joint venture between three huge players in construction, each with their own systems, has FlowForma helped you standardize and collaborate across all parties?

James Morgan25:07

The beauty of it is that, because we have confidence in the data we're capturing, we can share it through our Power BI reporting without any problem. It makes life a lot easier when handing that data over.

FlowForma25:34

Each party has its preferred vendors. What made you choose FlowForma, and what else did you look at?

James Morgan25:47

It took us quite a long time to find our ultimate solution. We looked at other market leaders, like K2 and Nintex, but from our point of view they were cost prohibitive. We also felt we'd still need quite a lot of support from IT, and we're a small team. We looked at PowerApps, which didn't fit the bill: some features looked good, but once we dived down into what we wanted to achieve, it became evident we'd need skills in APIs and probably a bit of Java.

James Morgan26:36

We looked at a couple of other no-code solutions, but they seemed very much in their infancy and lacked features we needed. We had about 60 requirement statements we were looking to satisfy in the selection process, and that's ultimately why we ended up with FlowForma.

FlowForma27:17

You already had Office 365, so I presume that played a big role, not just no code but the platform it would sit on?

James Morgan27:30

Completely. Our environment is 100% cloud-based; from day one the mantra was no servers on site. We went with an Office 365 tenant for all our users, and we were keen to keep single sign-on and that familiarity with the environment, which FlowForma brings.

FlowForma27:57

James, thanks a million for answering these questions with us today. I'm going to hand over to Paul Stone for our demonstration of FlowForma.

Paul Stone28:14

Before the demonstration, a few slides. FlowForma brings together three things in one product: workflow, the execution of tasks by people to achieve business goals; forms, the collection of data as those tasks are completed; and document generation, producing communications from the workflow that are relevant to each participant. Merging the three let us focus on ease of use, for end users and for the business users who configure it.

Paul Stone29:35

It's built on SharePoint, which stores all the information, and all of this is achieved with no code. You don't need a technical resource to use the system. The end result is an electronic system for capturing information that leads to better decisions, because you can roll the data up into reports. It runs in Office 365 on SharePoint Online, and SharePoint is the only prerequisite.

Paul Stone30:25

It works in any desktop browser, and our mobile apps for Apple and Android let you complete forms and carry on the workflow out on site. It fits environments with self-regulation or external regulators, because it records all your process activity in a central repository, ready for audit, instead of in email chains and spreadsheets. And it's truly self-build: over 92% of our clients build complete solutions with no code, with our professional services there to help.

Paul Stone32:25

Let me show you an employee onboarding process. From the dashboard, I click Start. The form isn't like forms you've seen before: across the top is a simple visualization of the workflow, so a business user can see exactly where they are. Each step is assigned to someone, and the workflow can branch, add steps dynamically, or run steps in parallel, like these three that are executed by different people.

Paul Stone34:31

Below the steps is the data captured at this stage. We support a wide range of data types, and fields are validated so the information is accurate. When I enter the manager, the system can pre-populate details from a lookup list or a user profile. When I submit, the work moves to the next task, and the people in the organization each do their part toward the business goal.

Paul Stone36:03

The next step is assigned to me for this demo, and I can accept or reject it, see the previous steps, and delegate tasks. Every step is recorded in an audit log. We also support electronic signatures, where the user re-enters their credentials to confirm it really is them approving.

Paul Stone37:25

Then the HR, IT and security steps run in parallel, and at the end the system automatically generates a welcome package as a PDF, using the information captured in the form. End users see lists of the processes they've started, are waiting on, or have tasks assigned in, so they can push their work through the system.

Paul Stone38:45

Dashboards are easy to configure. This one shows support tickets at different stages, and I can drill down into my workload. Performance reporting shows bottlenecks: on this demo site I never finish my onboarding workflows, so you can see a problem here. In real life, you'd drill into the details to find out whether it's a resource issue or a problem with the workflow.

Paul Stone40:13

Processes are configured in a tool called the Flow Designer, built for business users. You see the steps in the workflow and, inside each step, the questions people answer. Many workflow tools use flow charts, but we capture data and generate documents as well, which a flow chart can't easily show. If you like to sketch out a workflow in a workshop, there's a flowchart-style view for that too.

Paul Stone41:51

To add a step, I type its name, drag it into position, and add a question. I pick from a wide range of data types: a choice field, for example, or a lookup to a table, where I just choose the table and the field. It's all point and click, with no code.

Paul Stone43:27

What makes it really powerful is business rules: conditional actions. When data is entered, you might assign a step to someone, look up information from SharePoint, send an email, or generate a document. You build them through the same simple form-based interface, with no code at all.

Paul Stone45:00

As soon as you build a process, it's available on mobile, where you can capture GPS location, take photos, and sign with your finger. For documents, we have a Microsoft Word plugin: you insert fields from the workflow into a Word template, and the generated document includes the data captured in the form.

Paul Stone46:25

FlowForma uses SharePoint to store the documents it generates and the data it collects, in an encrypted format, so only people with the right access can get at it. You can report on it with tools like Microsoft Power BI, and integrate natively with SharePoint and with things like Microsoft SQL Server. If you ever find a limitation, you can extend the system with your own business rules and question types. And our online academy teaches you to build systems yourself, so IT is no longer the bottleneck.

Oliver48:41

Thank you, Paul, and thanks to James. Let's go to your questions. The first: is it really no code?

Paul Stone49:19

Yes. You configure the system by filling in forms: a form to create steps, a form to create questions, a form to create business rules. Over 92% of customers use FlowForma without any code at all. You might need code for integration with a back-end system, like an ERP or inventory system, and that's supported through our open web API.

Oliver50:14

James, how long have you been using FlowForma?

James Morgan50:27

We bought it toward the end of last year. Because of resources on our side, we started using it just after Christmas, and our first processes arrived in early January.

Oliver50:52

Are your FlowForma processes integrated with your project management solutions?

James Morgan51:00

Not natively at the moment, but I imagine they will be. We use Primavera P6 for planning, and we'll probably analyze that data in Power BI against responses from FlowForma. We're about to build the API so we can work with a GIS platform, and I'm sure we'll end up tying it into our P6 program too.

Oliver51:41

Paul, how long does it take to go live with a process?

Paul Stone51:55

For most everyday processes, it's a five-to-ten-day time frame. We promote prototyping: workshop on Monday, sketch it out on Tuesday, play it back to end users on Wednesday, then refine it, so by the end of the first or second week it's ready to go. Promoting a process from UAT into production is straightforward. Only particularly complex processes take longer.

Oliver53:11

Do I need internet to use FlowForma?

Paul Stone53:17

It's web based, so on the desktop you access it through a browser. Mobile is different: the apps cache information, so you can go entirely offline, fill in a form, and synchronize with SharePoint when you have connectivity again. That's relevant to people like James, whose workforce goes to remote sites.

Oliver54:21

Can you build an API into an ERP, so data collected is automatically entered into it?

Paul Stone54:36

If the ERP supports web APIs, you can pass data from the form into it. The first time, you write a small amount of code to create a business rule. After that it's a no-code rule that business users can reuse in different workflows. We'll give you all the information you need, or we can do it for you. Other clients have used SQL Server as a staging area between FlowForma and their ERP.

Oliver56:16

Final question: what technology do I need to run FlowForma?

Paul Stone56:27

The only prerequisite is Microsoft SharePoint, whether SharePoint Online in Office 365 or SharePoint on-premises. Beyond that, any modern browser works, and we support iOS and Android mobile devices.

Oliver57:04

That brings us to a close. Thanks to all our speakers for their time and insight, and to everyone who asked questions. Paul, any closing thoughts?

Paul Stone57:25

FlowForma is easy to use and easy to get going with. You can try it out, and we can arrange a one-to-one demo of your specific business scenarios. It's all about enabling a business to achieve its goals faster.

Oliver58:03

Thank you, James and Paul. It was a pleasure having you with us at OPEX Live, and thanks to everyone for taking part. Goodbye for now.