Turning great customer wins into bottom-line results and satisfied customers takes coordination, collaboration, and insight across every aspect of the end-to-end business. Organisations must rely on faultless management of both operational and project management processes.

So how can construction businesses get ahead, and stay ahead, in an industry that has traditionally been slow to optimise? How can they mobilise their IT landscapes to break down operational boundaries and remove information silos?

Project management complexities

It’s hard to imagine a project that is more complex and fragile than a large construction job. The path from initial estimate and quote to final approval and delivery is long. It is littered with potential pitfalls and bottlenecks. The critical components of the project itself – including resources, skill sets, physical materials and costs – need to be orchestrated across the foundational operational processes of the business. It draws in cross-department expertise such as finance, HR, sales, procurement, supply chain, logistics, project management, quality assurance and legal.

Typically, the interface between daily project management and business operations extends across multiple, disparate IT systems. Often, the consolidation of information across these systems is only possible with a lot of repetitive, manual work and some rather hefty Excel spreadsheets.

At best, this manual process is time-intensive and error-prone. At worst, the lack of real-time insight can mean that the process can go off the rails before the project team is even aware that there is an issue. The result can be missed deadlines, reduced profitability and dissatisfied customers. Not to mention stressed and frustrated employees.

Connecting operations and project management

Connecting the entire business in one cloud-based solution enables a free flow of business and project information across departments and functions. It also promotes a new level of collaboration and knowledge sharing across extended project teams.

Once implemented, the positive effect of truly joined-up solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Operations will be seen and experienced across every area of the business.

Joined-up systems align daily activities and processes with operational practices and corporate goals. This, in turn, gives each employee a shared baseline from which to collaborate, share knowledge and leverage skill sets.

With IT and collaboration barriers removed, construction organisations can enable significant improvements. They can see this in the way they handle the daily task of monitoring, managing and delivering on project expectations. Improvements that can be seen and felt in the business every day in the complex and large-scale orchestration that is at the heart of modern construction.

As Paul Fryer, Construction Industry Account Executive at DXC*, a Microsoft partner states: “Project operations comes in multiple ‘flavours’. DXC helps customers decide how best to take advantage of project ops and get the most business value from it.”

Four real-world benefits of removing organisational silos

1. 1. More flexible and intuitive project management: Base your planning on accurate and actionable project information from across the organisation. Additionally, document and surface planning with familiar Microsoft Project capabilities and visualisations. Project managers can then spend less time building plans and more time on ensuring that projects are running smoothly. And the whole business can easily stay in the loop.
   2. More effective and satisfied employees: Scheduling the right people with the right skills at the right time will help you to avoid classic workload issues. You will also get the most from your project teams. Add in simplified processes for time tracking and expense management and reimbursement and you have a great baseline for optimising resource usage. It will also help find and keep the best talent in the industry.
   3. A more predictable and healthier bottom line: Discover more accurate, experience-based estimating, quoting and forecasting, more effective use of materials and resources, and more informed and compliant project accounting.  Your project profitability will reflect every cost you have saved and deadline you have nailed.
   4. Improved collaboration and insight: Make data-driven decisions in real-time and collaborate easier with an organisation-wide collaboration platform – such as Microsoft Teams. Each new decision is based on experience from previous engagements. This can be aligned to support business goals and changing market demands.

Build agility and resilience in project management

In the ultra-competitive and dynamic world of construction, success is dependent on the ability to react quickly to changing industry, economic, legislative and cultural factors. Retaining and building on this success relies on the ability to consistently make business decisions. These decisions must not only be sound. They must also more insightful than your competitors.

Construction is an industry where fortunes can be made and lost based on the success of a few key projects. Therefore, it is essential that the IT systems deployed by construction companies are more like the final brick and mortar solutions they deliver for their customers. Practical, accessible and built to last.

*Note: DXC is one of the Dynamics partners we have at Microsoft to help us deliver on this proposal. DXC has many years’ experience of rolling out multi-country professional services deployments, supported by close alignment with the Microsoft Product Team for PSA and now Project Operations, enabling us to stay ahead with product developments and ensuring deployments with security and best practice baked in.

Find out more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Discover Dynamics 365 Project Operations capabilities

About the author

Toby is a Technical Specialist for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, focussing on Professional Services and the Construction industries. Critically, since the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Toby has been the UK Field Lead for Project Operations working on global projects across a multitude of different industries. Toby has been working in the technology and ERP space for several years. He is passionate about driving and providing business and digital transformation by realising the business value through transformational systems. He enjoys empowering organisations to get that ‘competitive edge’ over their competitors.

Toby has been working with the Project Operations Core Engineering and Marketing teams to develop the GTM strategy for the new products and drive new revenue from customers adopting the new platform.

The post How digital modernisation can help innovate the construction industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Intelligent automation to streamline operations

A McKinsey 2019 study found that 60 percent of all occupations have at least 30 percent of activities that could be automated. Intelligent automation is the combination of three key factors:

Digital Process Automation (DPA): Lets you automate workflows between applications and services, sync files, get notifications, collect data, and perform other common tasks across modern cloud services.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Turns manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with legacy on-premise software systems. You can program RPA to run unattended, accelerating automation of high-volume, repetitive tasks or automate cumbersome or repetitive processes while still allowing for human intervention.

AI: Integrate AI models into workflows with a low or no-code approach.

Using automation in finance to streamline operations

Together, these three factors combine to build automated workflows across all the apps, services, and on-premise legacy systems at the same time. Bridging DPA, RPA and AI into Power Platform makes it possible to create secure and compliant automation in your construction firm.

What happens when you use automation to take over manual time-consuming processes? You can free your financial team to focus on higher value work.

Automation can streamline operations and processes, such as invoicing. You can also use it to predict or view insights in real-time. You can also connect silos across your whole firm, giving your whole organisation a single source of truth.

Collecting intelligence at a larger scale will lead to better services and streamlined operations. This will lead to greater value driven, and increased agility.

For example, when connecting your finance data to your supply chain you forecast labour and product needs. This helps you make predictive and real-time decisions. As a result, construction projects are delivered quicker. You can also react quicker to external circumstances.

Grow with agility and resilience

Automation is a long-term strategy. You do get quick wins when you streamline operations and workflows – can you imagine how much time I would have saved in my finance role? But when connected with AI, it can help uncover and create new efficiencies in the future.

The important thing to remember about automation is that it amplifies our work. It lets people focus on strategic work. The Total Economic Impact of Power Apps, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester consulting on behalf of Microsoft in March 2020 found that employees were saving almost two hours a week from automation.

Construction firms have a lot of different needs, especially between different teams and on-site frontline workers. By giving everyone the tools to do their jobs smarter and faster, you can be more agile and resilient.

Find out more

Learn more about how we can help your business transform today

Discover how Power Automate can streamline repetitive tasks and paperless processes.

Learn how businesses reduced development costs and increased overall efficiency using Power Automate in this commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study.

Resources to empower your development team

Learn how to implement robotic process automation

Watch Microsoft Tech Days on-demand: An introduction to Power Platform 

About the author

Simon worked in practice for seven years before moving into the commercial sector as Finance Director of a global Industrial Pumps Business, mainly focussed on the oil and construction sectors. Simon then moved into sales of ERP Software. He now has over 25 years’ experience of selling ERP, with over 500 successful implementations – many on a global basis – across multiple sectors. He focussed primarily on construction, professional services, and field service industries, but also assisted many in the distribution, manufacturing, education and non-profit sectors.

Simon has now been at Microsoft for over three years and has brought his considerable ERP experience to become Sales Lead for Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management in the built sector.

The post How to use process automation in finance to streamline operations for construction firms appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Digital adoption has leapt forward two years in just a few months, both by choice and necessity. Bankers estimate there has been a sixfold surge in cashless transactions in 2020. Traditional lenders – with a cautious eye on fast-growing fintech startups – are each year investing tens of billions in innovation and upgrading their legacy systems. How can they ensure this money is wisely spent? And where and when will the sector start to see material return on investment (ROI)?

Innovation in digitalisation and ROI

“There is no doubt COVID-19 has really changed and accelerated the pace of digital transformation,” said Craig Wellman, Head of UK Financial Services Sales at Microsoft during a joint webinar with the Financial Times on the topic.

With the advent of cloud computing, he added that executives had already completely overhauled their ambitions. Their priorities are no longer only focused on cost cuts, but now also on AI-driven personalisation, cybersecurity and creating a faster, less cumbersome customer experience.

The normal ROI measures of customer loyalty, revenue generation and cost savings still remain relevant. Banks also have to invest to match to the high standards set by new consumer tech champions such as Amazon or Netflix.

“There’s no question customer expectations have changed a lot… their experience needs to feel personal, relevant and seamless,” said Josh Bottomley, Head of Digital at HSBC, Europe’s largest bank.

“The ‘computer says no’ example still sticks with people,” he added. “In banking there are still too many questions we can filter out from forms… We need to make it easier to log on to a single app with a personalised home screen.”

Digitalisation for competitive advantage

Banks are also challenged by easy-to-use fintech upstarts that are attracting droves of loyal users, especially among the young.

Lavanya Menon, Head of Digital Transformation Risk at Lloyds Bank, said that since her bank started its digitisation programme five years ago “we have made the gap between a fintech and a legacy bank smaller by trying to focus our investment on the ‘Amazonification’ of banking,” she said. “What has taken off is friction-free finance… that timeline is ever changing and never ending.”

Bottomley said another less obvious, but potentially more important, measure of return on digital investment was “future cost avoidance.”

He used the example of COVID-19. HSBC was able to participate in multiple government emergency financing schemes around the world in less than 48 hours by using secure, digital customer forms. This would have been impossible had the lender not migrated much of its data and processing to the cloud in recent years.

Long-term transformation and AI

There must also be a balance between major long-term transformation and “quick wins” said Wellman. The latter “generate excitement among customers and at the board level with an easily visible and speedy ROI.”

“You can’t just have a succession of unfinished five-year projects… When you get to the point previously thought to be a panacea, the market will have evolved again,” he added. For example, these days Microsoft updates Windows every few weeks rather than every few years.

The panel also discussed the future of personalised, AI-driven, automated service and selling. Is this a panacea for pressurised earnings in consumer banking – sitting as they do on vast pools of data for tens of millions of customers – or is it perilous and risks exacerbating inequality or discrimination in finance?

Menon said that while Lloyds had made “huge strides” in personalised cross-selling and single-sign on authentication, “as a risk professional what worries me is when we get into the field of AI and robotics, especially if we rely solely on algorithms” because there are always concerns about biased or incomplete data.

“I am pleased regulators haven’t made progress in the space yet,” she added. “It gives us a needed pause before we wade into a field we don’t really understand.”

Wellman concurred, saying “implementing AI processes on top of inaccurate or unmanageable data feeds risks simply speeding up the process of bad decision making…”

However, on a more simplistic level, AI can reduce frustrating and time consuming tasks like form filling, with intelligent systems prepopulating data across various platforms, he added. This addresses “the thing all consumers want first: simplicity and ease of use”. It also means employees can be freed up for those more complex tasks and providing personalised service.

While regulators haven’t reached the field of AI, banking organisations can take their own steps to responsible and ethical AI to reduce the risk of bias, security, and more. Microsoft have shared their responsible AI principles.

The future of digitalisation

The best way to get started is with a strong business strategy that includes utilising data to differentiate your value proposition, re-evaluate the potential of existing or new revenue streams and establishing trustworthiness in both customers and employees.

Organisations who focus on those key factors also heavily emphasise customer insights and intelligence, utilising technology to drive personalised experiences, using data to respond quickly to external and internal changes. They also find new ways to innovate and streamline operations, leveraging employees to be more agile and drive new opportunities.

Find out more

Watch the on-demand webinar: The digital transformation timeline with Microsoft and The Financial Times

Read the blog: 3 ways the banking sector can innovate in the new normal

Download the report: Boosting the innovation of banking business models

About the authors

Stephen Morris is the Financial Times’ (FT) Banking Editor.  He was formerly the FT’s European Banking Correspondent. He joined the FT in August 2018 after eight years with Bloomberg News, where he was UK Banks Reporter. Prior to that, he covered politics for the Independent.

Craig Wellman leads Microsoft’s financial services organisation in the UK with a singular ambition – to enable financial services institutions to harness the power of technology to accelerate transformation and reimagine what’s possible.

As one of the UK’s largest sectors, the financial services industry impacts our lives daily. With rapid digitisation underway, from front office to back, financial institutions have a once in a generation opportunity to combine existing and new industry capabilities to deliver a more seamless, secure and personalised experience.

Craig spends his time providing trusted consultancy to senior leaders of financial institutions across the UK. By showcasing the art of the possible, Craig helps leaders devise strategies that better serve customers, enhance the productivity and wellbeing of employees, and future-proof their businesses, whilst meeting the requirements of an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.

With more than 25 years’ experience, Craig has held senior leadership roles across several market-leading organisations, including Legal & General, Vodafone and Virgin Group. He enjoys spending time with his wife and three children at their home in West Berkshire and is a keen runner and football fan.

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