Creating Integrated Workflows for an Evolving Company

Our goal is now to view issues from a strategic perspective, creating solutions that consider the big picture of how our company functions.

This is where enterprise content management and workflow becomes crucial. The ability to manage workflows across a common platform is a vital part of accommodating a larger enterprise with many islands of organization. Data needs to be accessible. In today’s world, the quicker we can access data, the more efficient we are. Yet in keeping with D&H’s priority on relationships and team interaction these workflows and technology solutions need to maintain their value for each unique department as well. This process began with the deployment of Microsoft’s SharePoint collaborative software tools, which offer opportunities for workflow management.

D&H is primarily a sales organization, so document and workflow management is a huge element of its daily operations. The company deals with a consistent flow of contracts, invoices, bills of materials, and more. It’s our responsibility to integrate our document management processes so these records can be easily accessed by the sales department, the buying department, and others. Without such integration, personnel will hit stop-gaps as requests for information pass from department to department. The goal is to allow a single staff member to immediately and directly access the documentation or information they need for their projects.

Scalability of workflow and document management systems is also key in assuring a smooth growth trajectory for the enterprise. As a smaller organization, when a challenge presented itself, we could easily assign a team of technicians to address an issue. As a larger organization, this becomes less feasible. A typical issue would require too large a team to address the more complex needs of a larger enterprise. We need future-proofed systems to address our business processes.

D&H in fact was able to use email as a workflow solution for many years, to keep track of partner communications and workflows via email trails. E.g., accounts payable used email to track correspondence of different customer issues, which is realistic when you have customers numbering in the hundreds. However, when your customer roster reaches the tens of thousands, email is not sufficient for this purpose—no matter how terrific a tool it is for communications. We needed to adapt the right solution for the right task via an enterprise workflow. Otherwise, it’s like trying to build a house with a hammer—it’s a great tool, but you can’t use it for everything if you want to build efficiently.

Similarly, D&H hosts a series of trade shows for its customers each year, which is a laborious undertaking. The team is migrating from a less scalable solution–one of those “islands of organization”–to a cloud solution that will eventually integrate with our CRM systems. This integration will allow internal departments to share data effectively and thus reduce manual effort, perform better analytics and make better decisions overall. Over the last several years, we’ve been researching and deploying solutions that will unify desperate systems across the organization, creating efficiencies and accommodating legacy systems. We’re in the process of a “deep dive” analysis to develop an integrated enterprise solution that leverages the capabilities of existing technologies, like SharePoint, as well as new technologies that will position us for the future. It’s an ongoing evolution.

Growth is the best problem any organization can have, and all successful enterprises face these trials. As with any complex and evolving corporation, no single solution can address all its needs and departmental requirements. An integrated ecosystem of workflow management solutions, however, can address the vision of D&H Distributing as a comprehensive organization, while still meeting the needs of its separate departments, and its unique individuals.