Introduction

Every organization has an objective to improve the efficiency and productivity of their employees, to improve their operational margins and eliminate the redundant work.  Though organizations are focussing on adopting various technological solutions in digitizing their processes, most of these systems are targeting a specific business / departmental operation.  While ERP systems are giving solutions across the organizational departments, their processes are confined to the SOP’s followed by majority of similar organizations.  This leaves the organizations with limited options to customize the operations or missing functionalities. 

To address these issues, most of the times organizations will end up in integrating various systems by adopting or develop the integration applications.  Developing or adopting the integration applications is a costly affair most of the times.  With the monolithic application development, the development time is high, costly and a working product can be seen only at the end of the complete development.

Business Problem

One of our customers who is a global media giant was facing a similar problem.  Customer has a large set of enterprise-wide applications including SAP, ServiceNow, JIRA etc., However, their staff were working manually on some processes, which are repetitive and time taking. 

One such problem is Email Follow-ups with their clients.  Our customer has a huge number of clients across the globe, spread in multiple regions.  Customer needs to process their client invoices periodically and do a payment follow-up regularly.  In this process, every region has multiple collectors (28 collectors globally) who will follow-up with a set of clients.  Every month, each of these collectors have to send almost 400 to 600 emails to their clients on payment follow-ups for few thousands of invoices. 

So, every collector does the following steps repeatedly.

1. 1. Prepare a statement of account from SAP system, which is essentially consists of their client’s invoices and the outstanding amount

1. 1. For every invoice in the statement, an invoice copy must be downloaded from the SAP system.

1. 1. Send an email to every client, with a statement of their invoices along with the invoice copies.

While preparing a statement is an easy task, preparation of the Client level statement along with the invoice copies and mailing it to their client was a time-consuming job.  Each collector was spending almost 3 working days for this activity.  Which is close to 1000 person days or 45+ person months per year.

Customer identified this area for optimization and requested us to design an automated solution for this.

Our Solution

Xyram explored various options to automate this process, while considering the Cost of Development, Time taken for Development, and maintainability.

• • Creating a solution in the enterprise applications native stack, many of which will require longer delivery time and hence higher cost

• • Develop an integration application using traditional software – Development time and costs are high and need additional infrastructure to host the application.

• • Low-Code or No-Code Automation tools – Cost effective and development time is very low. 

After comparing the options, Xyram proposed to implement the Low-Code or No-Code based automation in Microsoft Power Platform. With Power Platform based solution, customer can have the following advantages

• • Infrastructure Cost : Zero as the application can be deployed in 0365 with SharePoint.

• • Licenses:  No need to have extra licenses, except for premium connector license, which is negligible when compared with the savings.

• • Dev Time:  With rapid application development approach, where solution will be ready in just a few days

• • Deployment and Maintainability:  Very easy to deploy and available for global users

• • Enhancements: Very easy to enhance.

• • IT Security:  No need to go for additional security permissions, as the application will be using the AD credentials and the data transfer is highly secured.

Finally, Xyram developed the application using the below components

1. 1. A Power Automate flow to generates the Invoice statement at regular intervals of time and stores the data in SharePoint and downloads the invoices to SharePoint.

1. 1. Power Apps application reads this data and prepares the Client wise Email

1. 1. On End user selecting the required client, an email is sent from Power Apps to client.

1. 1. Power BI Report to provide analytical insights to the follow-up mails.

Backend Components:

• • Microsoft SharePoint

• • Microsoft O365 Outlook

• • Microsoft Excel

The entire development of this solution took only two weeks and now widely being used in all regions. 

Conclusion

By implementing the solution, Xyram was able to reduce 90% of the time spent by each collector and almost 70% financial savings.  Which is significant saving in financials and productivity. This is one example where Xyram provided the necessary consulting and solutioning expertise to improve business operations dramatically at a low cost in short time. If you are interested in our business consulting and solutioning services. Please reach out to contact@xyramsoft.com for further details and to help you in this journey