Extending the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Suite with Process innovations.

Being an innovator, observation has played a key role in our Panther Nails journey so far. Keeping up to date with the contemporary trends and technologies, we had adopted Microsoft Office 365 suite at an early stage. Microsoft Excel add-in, Microsoft Office add-in is in our quiver for a long time.

We observed that at least 60% of enterprises in India have one of the Microsoft Office 365 License, either E1, E3, or E5. But what all they use out of it is Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint only. The suite has some other featured applications which only up to 5% of enterprises are utilizing. Applications such as Teams Bespoke APP, Power BI, Power APP, Power Automate are not utilized at all.

There was a client who was using our application to keep track of all the activities on the floor. The floor manager used to get the report at the end of the day fill in some other manual details and send it to Vertical Head. The Vertical head had such 7 plants under him which used to report him daily, his job was to consolidate all reports extract important points with some predefined metrics, summarize the report and send it further in the chain. This whole process was of about 3–5 hours long.

We observed this routine and knew there is a scope for process enhancement. We suggested reducing this manual job collection, conciliation, and summarization of reports. We made an application workflow using Power Apps and Power Automate that observes a defined OneDrive location. Floor managers across all plants have been instructed to put the report in the same folder. All such reports get picked up from a defined location, processed, and summarized automatically. The reconciliation of the data is shown in a dashboard designed with Power Apps which was integrated inside the Microsoft Teams app terminal which was the easiest, and handy tool already installed at all hierarchical levels.

Passion for innovation drives us for creating new possibilities. Going from 0 to 1 is a big thing, but collating them together and multiplying the usability provide a new dimension for to look for. Taking things to the next level, bringing up from 0 to 1 and pushing further with 1 to n…