Abel Solutions helps companies to both direct and focus their intranet adoption efforts by offering the services of our SharePoint Business Analyst.
The Role of a SharePoint Business Analyst
Businesses can sometimes face complicated or even abstract difficulties that have real impacts on their bottom line. Inefficient operations, inadequate communication between management and employees, and lack of access to important information can all undermine a business’s performance. Many businesses choose to adopt an intranet system to address these problems. While introducing an effective intranet to the work environment can help improve all of these issues, the adoption process can grow into an unwieldy nightmare if mismanaged. Abel Solutions helps clients with all phases of their business’s intranet implementation project, from planning to long-term support.
We specialize in the use of one intranet platform because of its flexible design properties, intuitive interface for end-users, ability to integrate with Office 365, and business-friendly capabilities: Microsoft SharePoint. Our SharePoint experts, a team of consultants, architects, and developers, create custom intranet solutions for businesses pursuing various kinds of improvement. The first stage of developing an effective employee intranet is to put clients in contact with our SharePoint Business Analyst. This person helps a client first identify and second understand the difficulties their business is facing, then teaches them how they can use SharePoint as a tool to attack those problems head-on. The analyst learns everything that they can about the client’s business — how it operates, what problems it is facing, etc. — and begins examining their processes for potential improvement.
Process Automation Capabilities
When looking for business operations to upgrade, our analyst stays vigilant for inefficiencies. One operation that many businesses conduct inefficiently is the processing of time-off requests. If HR is splitting valuable attention between monotonous, repeatable processes like this one — checking available PTO hours, sending approval request notifications to relevant managers, coordinating with accounting to process funds for approved hours, notifying employee whether their request was approved or denied — and their other duties, our SharePoint Business Analyst will likely note this inefficiency and recommend automating the process. With their SharePoint intranet attending to this process, Human Resources can spend more time on other tasks that require human attention.
A Hypothetical on Nintex Boosting Efficiency
The way that our SharePoint team accomplishes this by using the platform’s compatibility with Nintex. By employing a combination of forms, which capture user-entered data, and workflows, which instruct the system on tasks to complete using the data captured, our SharePoint experts can automate an operation like PTO requests. That process might look something like this:
- The employee submits a PTO request form, filling out details like their name, their supervisor’s name, desired hours and dates, and their reason for taking off work
- A workflow kicks off to send their supervisor an email outlining the details entered in the request form and notifying them of any conflicts present on the employee’s Outlook calendar
- The supervisor responds to the email with some variation of “yes” or “no”
- A no in response starts a workflow that notifies the employee that their request has been denied
- A yes in response starts another workflow that notifies accounting of the PTO request and adds an entry to their task list featuring the information from the initial form
- Completing the item on the task list and closing it out would send off a final notification email to the employee, their supervisor, and HR that the request had been completed
These general functions can be used in numerous other ways to automate redundant tasks and increase a company’s efficiency of business processes. The SharePoint Business Analyst will help clients determine which issues can be addressed by automation and which are better handled by apps.
Apps: The Other Efficiency-Booster
SharePoint’s apps are the varied interactive elements on the intranet’s site pages. One of the most universally helpful of these is the document library. This app acts as a receptacle in which businesses can store data from a variety of formats, such as word documents, PDFs, excel spreadsheets, and more. These items can then be categorized according to their respective metadata, making them easy to sort by function, department, file type, or various other configurable criteria.
When this database becomes too large to comb through in that way, SharePoint also features a powerful search function. Searches can be performed within specific document libraries or across the entire site, ensuring important documents can be located quickly. Each item populated in the search results contains the keyword in its title, metadata, or even somewhere within its content; this feature makes search easy to use regardless of how familiar the user is with the sought-after data. Other apps will perform other functions that help to order and streamline data interaction and business processes.
A Pre-Configured Solution
Understanding the client’s business and their struggles, as well as the platform’s capabilities, enable SharePoint Business Analysts to help clients get the most out of their custom-built intranet system. For those businesses who face less demanding problems, we also offer a pre-configured company intranet solution. Featuring an assortment of standard features that will fulfill many businesses’ needs, Share|Net is ready to use as soon as it is installed. Although this solution does not boast the same limitless customization potential as a custom-built intranet, it can be implemented much more quickly. Our SharePoint Business Analyst will help each client determine which choice is most appropriate to their business’s circumstances.
Abel Solutions — The Intranet Experts
For over twenty years, Abel Solutions has been formulating effective, SharePoint-based responses to our clients’ IT difficulties. Nintex recognizes us as a Premiere partner, qualifying us to provide a variety of services beyond creating workflows and forms, including end-user training, product licensing, long-term software support, solution implementation, and business consultation. To supply our clients with the most comprehensive array of IT offerings that we can, Abel Solutions also performs helpdesk support, network administration, and data security services.
If your business wants to improve its operations by implementing an intranet, contact Abel Solutions. Our SharePoint Business Analyst can help you determine how to proceed toward your goals.