Industry Leader in Manufacturing for 75+ Years
Since its inception, AMOT has been a leading manufacturer of thermostatic temperature controlling valves thereby becoming a pioneer in preventing diesel runway. It is the only company in the world that offers a range of depth and breadth choices for safety, control and administering of the smooth functioning of rotating devices. As its global ecosystem was evolving it needed to accelerate its operations in all departments viz. HR, Finance, Administration, etc. The first step was to reduce the approval chain management automating it and driving faster decisions. AMOT was on the lookout for a strategic partner that could develop a solution for it to address its pain point.
Deliveries
– PowerApps
– Web Apps
Approval Chain Management and How to Automate It
AMOT felt a huge gap in catalyzing its operations and making quicker decisions by reducing manual intervention. The most gigantic issue was that there were huge approval processes in almost all departments and managing them manually required a massive workforce. Every approval chain needed to be put down on sheets or MS Forms and other data-organizing platforms. The approval chain could not be taken to the next person in link unless the prior stakeholder had approved it.
A coordinator took the responsibility of keeping this chain aligned and sent approval requests based on the hierarchy or relevancy levels. This stunted the operations’ request approval, and a mammoth of time was spent only on organizing and management. As there were multiple departments viz. Finance, Operations, HR, etc., each department with its own sets of approval processes costing a huge, energy and human effort.
Microsoft PowerApps Comes as a Rescuer
Sunflower Lab partnered with AMOT to develop a CDS application for them deployed on PowerApps to streamline the approval process. At first, AMOT used MS Forms to assimilate data but with our partnership, we extracted this data from SharePoint and other sources using Dataverse and then this data was incorporated in PowerApps. The application was built keeping an impeccable UI and seamless UX in the blueprint. After the complete design of the app, a quality check was established to pat any missing elements. An integration was established between Outlook and Microsoft Flows to get the approvals for the requests made.
Once the approver approves or rejects a request it is sent to the initiator to take further action or to the next stakeholder in the pipeline. Since the app is deployed on the cloud, it is protected and secure with no tampering, enabling the stakeholders to work on other productive tasks and lesser on coordination.
Automating the Process of Approval
Chain with PowerApps
Chain with PowerApps
To minimize the overhead while approving requests needed to be made a seamless process. To counteract this gap an automated system needed to be adopted to cut down on time and cost while optimizing workforce participation.
Approval of Credit Requests
AMOT found the process of approval-chain management a bottleneck while planning to expedite the business process. This process was highly cumbersome requiring dedicated manpower to manage approval chains. In case credit was required for some project or operation from the finance department, the process became quite hefty as the approvals needed to be taken on multiple levels.
Personal Time Off Approval for Employees
For any employee’s personal time off, keeping a hand/machine-written record of the employee’s time off was hard to organize. A process needed to be followed where all the leave approvals/rejections could be managed automatically. With automation, the process maximizes accuracy and rules out the scope of inconsistencies involved.
Employee Data Updation
If the employees wanted to update any of their personal data or details in the organization, then ideally, they had to go through their HR. As AMOT was scaling up its operations, it required a powerful system that could be automated and self-sustained. It needed to make this process self-driven as every minute detail taken to HR could lead to exhaustion, and a new procedure needed to be adopted. Thus the first step was to get the request approved by the managers and then the HR, leading to optimized use of resources, and next to develop a solution which adopted this in their application.
Offer Approval Process
While selecting a new candidate at AMOT, initial approval for the job offer was taken from lower management i.e., the reporting manager. Henceforth, it was taken for approval to higher management viz. senior project managers, and subsequently to the president. However, this hierarchy isn’t set in stone, AMOT was looking for a process to onboard more employees in a seamless and streamlined manner ruling out the scope of discrepancies. Once the offer was approved by the top level only then the job could be offered to the candidate.
Employee Offer Acceptance or Resignation
An automated ecosystem needed to be adopted in the HR department where they could smoothen the process of a candidate’s choice of joining or denying the offer. For this a soft copy of the offer letter was sent to the candidates. While following the offer acceptance/denial by the prospective candidates, if they found the jobs suitable as per their roles and competencies, they could e-sign the letter with their consent and pass it forward. Similarly, if the candidate chose to deny the offer they could simply state so.
Break Free from Manual Approval Chain With PowerApps
Now credit memo approval, personal time off request (PTO) approval, employee data change, offer approval process and employee acceptance and resignation approval flows are successfully optimized saving AMOT tons of time. The finance, HR, and IT departments benefit most since they frequently communicate in cross-functional teams. By deploying this Canvas app on PowerApps the presence of AMOT is taken globally thus converging the distance by huge bits. The approval of requests is automated and becomes faster within security standards. Now AMOT has adopted state-of-the-art norms and upgrading its system using innovative technology.
The result is an immaculate application streamlining the internal operations of AMOT and another step towards making it an industry leader.
“At AMOT, we’re committed to excellence in manufacturing. Sunflower Lab’s Power Automation solutions played a key role in streamlining our operations, reducing downtime, and enhancing performance. They worked closely with us to create custom Power Apps, resulting in powerful automation tools that have greatly improved our daily operations“
Jignesh Bhojani
Business Intelligence and Analytics Lead at AMOT
