Customer
The Bourne Group
Silversands
Silversands is a Microsoft Gold partner specializing in Microsoft 365 and cloud & hybrid infrastructure. Through professional services and support, Silversands provides vital expertise to guide organizations on a successful journey towards a ‘Modern Workplace’ where users enjoy the full productivity benefits of technology, in a secure and compliant environment.
Learn moreSummary
The Bourne Group is a European construction engineering company that focuses on delivering technical excellence across multiple markets. The organization is comprised of four group companies including Bourne Steel, Bourne Special Projects, Bourne Parking, and Bourne Nuclear.
With Office 365 as a key component in driving collaboration and communication within the organisation, the Bourne Group looked to build a modern application to replace their Excel-based system for reporting of non-conformities within the company. Bourne asked Silversands to look at a browser-based application that would allow both remote and office-based users to log, access and report on non-conformities. With SharePoint, PowerApps, Flow and Excel, Silversands delivered a solution that was quick to develop and deploy and reaped massive business benefits
Challenge
Bourne’s companies all record non-conformities, which occur when construction work doesn’t meet specifications. By tracking non-conformities and how and why they occurred, construction engineering organizations, like the Bourne Group, can find ways to prevent them in the future and, thereby, reduce risks of rework and overruns.
Employees across the companies recorded the non-conformities in numerous Excel spreadsheets, requiring all staff to have access to Excel and the file server. To further complicate the process, some data fields are similar across companies, while others are not. At the end of each cycle, the Conformity Manager was required to collate the spreadsheets to produce an overall view of the scale, nature, and efficiency of resolution. This existing non-conformance solution was not only
complex and very manual, but also insecure and potentially error-prone. There had to be an easier way.
To accurately record and monitor the non-conformities, Bourne wanted a more seamless process that would allow a user to add an item in one form from a remote location, then notify the right people to capture data according to the responses. They reached out to Silversands for an Office 365-based solution for non-conformance reporting.
Strategy
To provide a consistent method of data input, alerting, workflow and reporting, Silversands provided a solution using the Office 365 services that Bourne already had. Using Office 365 tools, Silversands created an application using PowerApps that allows users to report a non-conformity from their mobile devices or desktops. In this application, staff members enter all data within a SharePoint list. The form responds as the user enters data to ensure that all data is captured accurately, triggering the correct business flow – which is controlled by Microsoft Flow. The Conformity Manager can filter and sort the SharePoint list in which the data is stored to provide the information needed for reporting. If required, the manager may then download the data in an Excel file.
Results
By using existing services within Office 365, Silversands was able to quickly create, scale, and deploy an easy-to-use solution to Bourne and its group companies that did not require any additional licenses. Employees working within the field and the office can now access the application, quickly report a non-conformity, and act on recorded data.
