Challenge
Background
Large companies have many small routine procedures related to different areas of their daily lives. Employees’ vacation requests, business trips, workplace stationery, guest passes, meeting rooms booking and much more – all of those are simple one-two step actions, which don’t require lots of efforts but can be very distracting and sometimes cause unpleasant situations because of mistakes.
To address that routine, many companies decide to automate procedures using its own corporate Office 365 environment and Teams messenger. Our client wanted to do it as well. The process of guest passes generation was chosen to be the first one to automate.
Routine procedures done manually may cause mistakes in bookings or can make clients wait at the very last moment because they didn’t receive a guest pass.
Solution
What has been done
The automation was done based on Microsoft Flow and Teams chatbot. SharePoint Online was used as a storage.
Earlier, an employee would call or write an email to an office manager providing all the details for the pass. As there were many requests every day, a large part of the administrator’s working time was spent on them. Besides, an employee sometimes would wait almost the whole day to get the pass.
After the automation of this process, employees now only need to send a brief message request to the chatbot and soon after that they receive back the required paper.
The whole process looks like:
- Employee that need a pass, contact the chatbot. In a quick and simple conversation, they provide all the details required to create the pass.
- Wait for approval step of the process. A responsible office manager receives a notification in the bot and by email. The manager can see the information and choose to approve or to reject the pass generation.
- If the manager approves the request, the flow continues to run. The data gets into a pre-created Word template and is being added to the relevant fields. The new Word document is then created and saved.
- Once the document is ready, an employee who requested it gets a chat message informing about the approval and a link to access the document.
Result
Project results
- Pass request processing and issuing time reduced from 4-5 hours (on average) to 20-30 min
- An office manager got 2-3 hours daily freed due to this process automation
