One of the most popular project types we see with clients is automating a manual process using SharePoint, in order to streamline a Line-of-Business operation. Typically, this starts out with a pain point that surfaces, where people have become fed up with a particular inefficiency and start figuring out what that problem is costing them. To illustrate this use, I’ll share a recent client example, where a financial services company had distributed sales agents who were independent contractors. These agents typically needed to be licensed or certified in order to sell products or deliver services for the company. The compliance department was “pained” by the time-intensive manual – and error-prone – processes of tracking which contractors in the network were currently licensed or needed license renewals, maintaining documentation on licenses, and providing audit support..

While a national company, the enterprise still faxed documents around to facilitate these processes, and the faxes needed to be filed and maintained for each subcontractor. Over time, this became costly, as an increasingly large amount of people, paper, processes, and places (storage) were allocated to this effort. Finally, a department head asked an employee to detail the hard and soft costs, as well as corporate sustainability factors associated with the processes. They included:

• Resources dedicated to managing the process, with full benefits and infrastructure overhead
• Cost of agents’ time to maintain compliance
• Storage of paper
• Retrieval of paper for audits
• Failure rate on audits and cost-per-incident
• Transmission costs - fax lines, hardware, and consumables
• Volume of paper waste contributing to the company’s overall carbon footprint

After an initial assessment, the compliance department understood the current processes to ensure current sales agent certification were screaming to be automated and optimized, and SharePoint – which the company was already using for other document management systems - was a great (simple) tool to handle the automation. With its built-in capabilities for workflow, approval loops, and document management, SharePoint jump-started the project and cut the development time by 75% over conventional “from-scratch” application development. The solution was implemented and deployed in a matter of a few months. Using the new process, the client now sees more green from:

• Personnel freed up for revenue-generating activities
• Eliminated paper usage and consumables in the printing process (going green!)
• Reduced storage and retrieval costs
• Increased audit success rates, reducing costs associated with failed audits

The project paid for itself in the same calendar year and will continue to work saving thousands every month. This sort of cost recovery project is a popular strategy in today’s business climate. Smart organizations are making strategic investments in technology where it can help them trim costs dramatically, and push more money to the bottom line every month. Almost every company has a challenge in some area of document management, from Human Resources to Sales to Operations. Using technologies such as SharePoint can help move these manual processes and forms online, for easier completion, retention, retrieval, and management.

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