Thirteen Group - Microsoft SharePoint and Power Automate

Every single one of Thirteen's properties has a substantial amount of associated documents. Thirteen's agents need fast access to these documents to deliver an outstanding customer experience. For that to happen they needed to be stored and managed efficiently, but with a mostly analogous property management process, that was proving difficult. 

Thirteen’s agents were manually processing paper documents and individually importing them into an SQL database. Having to scan, save and label each document was a 6-step process that took their agents a long time, giving them less time to focus on customer care.

The process was forcing them to do something that people are notoriously bad at; staying alert while performing a tedious, repetitive task. This caused 'human error' mistakes while importing documents, making it difficult for other agents to find customer information quickly.

Harness the power of robotic process automation (RPA) using Microsoft SharePoint and Power Automate!

As a Gold Microsoft Partner, we knew this would be a perfect solution to Thirteen’s problems, offering a way to simplify the access and storage of essential documents; Power Automation and optical character recognition (OCR) technology would shorten the 6-step document import process down to a single action and Microsoft SharePoint would allow them to access relevant records from any location or device.

With the plan signed off, our Modern Workplace Technology Specialist got to work building Thirteen’s custom SharePoint environment. Once done, it was time for Thirteen to export the hundreds of thousands of documents from their legacy database and import them into SharePoint. Easy enough… right?

Wrong. After starting, Thirteen quickly found that 75,000 documents had been mislabelled in the legacy database. Missing essential information, they couldn't transfer these documents into the new SharePoint system. The only solution was to update each document manually. Although it would only take 2 minutes to update each record with a correct label, this would add up to 300+ full working days of effort to fix completely.

That’s where our Workplace Solutions Expert came to the rescue! He built a custom automation workflow through RPA, creating a bot that could pull every item of information needed to correctly label each document and place it next to each record, speeding up the entire process.

We are thrilled to have been Thirteen's chosen technology partner for several digital transformation projects over the years, helping them find more efficient, modern and less expensive ways of working.

With their custom RPA tool, Thirteen’s agents were able to correctly label each document in 20 seconds instead of 2 minutes, saving them roughly 250 working days. 

And they can now find relevant documents much faster, freeing agents to focus more time on customer service. Their digitised management system also reduces risk of import errors with metadata, and makes GDPR compliance simple with powerful document retention controls.