The Revenue team within our Finance division is composed of accounting professionals with product, industry, and region-specific expertise. These professionals review and document accounting conclusions on the company’s major contracts with its customers, an activity that involves coordination across a global team and the assessment of numerous legal documents.

As our contract portfolio grew, our time spent on workstream management and completing review documentation increased in parallel. Team leads read through each deal’s document stack to assign contracts to their staff and decide the order of priority. The initial assessment of each deal’s construct and assignment process required lengthy, time-consuming efforts that didn’t help us complete our final documentation. Further, a subset of our reviews resulted in standard conclusions that did not require subject matter experts to apply professional judgement.

There had to be a more efficient way to work through the reviews. With an open mind, a companywide focus on automating for scale, and access to Microsoft Azure’s industry-leading technology, we set out on a journey to find a solution.

At the core, this was a document processing opportunity, and we knew Azure AI technologies could do this super fast and provide a streamlined and consistent process.

—Mathew Abraham, technical program manager, Corporate Accounting

Our Revenue team engaged our Intelligent Transformation Finance (ITF) team to design a solution. ITF started by interviewing our subject matter experts with the goal of using their knowledge to automate aspects of contract review function. The outcome was a platform with the ability to read documents and assess the likelihood that a contract would require an accounting assessment. The platform is powered by team member expertise input and machine learning.

Today the team makes daily use of the solution to manage its global contract queue. The tool replaces the manual pre-read by performing a precursory document review and delivers insights that produce time savings and streamlines global coordination and prioritization. The platform is now an integral part of our contract review function’s tool ecosystem.

“At the core, this was a document processing opportunity, and we knew Azure AI technologies could do this super fast and provide a streamlined and consistent process,” says Mathew Abraham, a technical program manager on the Corporate Accounting team who worked on the project.

There were two other significant benefits that the team realized. First, it provided more insights than was expected, so the team needed to figure out which insights to pull forward and look at while doing manual reviews. Second, it was very good at integrating into other systems, which helped the team with automation.

We are a small team and in order to drive big impact at scale we needed to leverage tools that could accelerate our development while being compliant and timeless. That’s why we turned to Azure.

—Dana Borgmann, technology program manager, Intelligent Transformation Finance

“It’s truly amazing what the Azure suite of technologies makes available,” Abraham says.

What started with the age-old time savings value proposition, produced a best-in-class document review solution that addresses business challenges across multiple organizations within Microsoft. A deep dive of the solution architecture best tells the story.

[Read more about digitizing contract management with microservices on Azure. Discover transforming how contract creation works at Microsoft with automation. Unpack shifting to paperless contract lifecycle management to help schools navigate COVID-19.]

Getting the design right

“We are a small team and in order to drive big impact at scale we needed to leverage tools that could accelerate our development while being compliant and timeless. That’s why we turned to Azure,” says Dana Borgmann, a technology program manager on the Intelligent Transformation Finance team.

The team approached designing a solution with a few key principles in mind.

Firstly, they wanted to leverage as many off-the-shelf products as possible. This would buy both scale and speed, as well as ensure the design could take advantage of ongoing improvements by the Microsoft product teams. Microsoft Azure services are continually being improved and those improvements are implemented automatically to the cloud services. So, if the team based their design on these services, this ensured they could count on them being supported, compliant, scalable, and easily implemented. With a small team, this approach gave access and the benefits of all of Microsoft’s engineering via the Azure services.

Secondly, the solution needed to be continually improving and learning from its own previous experiences. So it was essential that the design enabled continuous improvement. We also needed the ability to demonstrate how accurate the model was for implementation and the life of the solution.

Lastly, the team recognized early on, this technology could be applied to many types of contracts and documents and so, rather than build a one-off solution, it was designed as a platform. Then it could more quickly adapt to new use cases and document types.

Turning to Microsoft Azure Services

With these principles in mind, the team set out to knit the needed Microsoft Azure services together. We started by finding the right solution to read the contracts. The solution had to achieve an elevated level of accuracy, to translate into multiple languages, and to apply these across all types of documents quickly. For this, we turned to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services.

Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services are cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) services that help developers build cognitive intelligence into applications without having direct AI, data science skills, or knowledge. They are available through REST APIs and client library SDKs (Software Development Kits) in popular development languages. The services enable developers to easily add cognitive features into their applications with cognitive solutions that can see, hear, speak, and analyze.

We leveraged Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer, Microsoft Azure Optical Character Recognizer (OCR), and Microsoft Azure Translator. These combined services can be quickly configured to diverse types of documents, accurately read both handwritten and typed text, and do so in PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, images, and many other document types while translating them in real time in over 100 languages.

By utilizing Azure Cognitive Services, Applied AI, and Azure Machine Learning, we can focus attention on the custom risk scoring model. A handful of people can deliver significant business impact because we have the full power of Microsoft product engineers and data scientists behind us.

—Sam Lee, senior data scientist, Intelligent Transformation Finance

Once they had read the documents, we then needed to make searching on them easy to enable the revenue accountants to quickly find key words, phrases, or any other terms. The solution needed to find the correct response in all document types and to understand a user’s intent both as a searcher and in the documents themselves. For this, we relied on Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search, which is the only cloud search service with built-in AI capabilities that enriches all types of information to help you identify and explore relevant content at scale.

You can use cognitive skills for vision, language, and speech, or use custom machine learning models to uncover insights from all types of content. The service offers semantic search capability, which uses advanced machine learning techniques to understand user intent and contextually rank the most relevant search results. This enabled us to access the full content of the documents and make all that content searchable and usable in their next design element – determining the likelihood that a contract required an in-depth assessment.

“By utilizing Azure Cognitive Services, Applied AI, and Azure Machine Learning, we can focus attention on the custom risk scoring model,” says Sam Lee, a senior data scientist on the Intelligent Transformation Finance team. “A handful of people can deliver significant business impact because we have the full power of Microsoft product engineers and data scientists behind us.”

Using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

We relied on Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, which empowers data scientists and developers to build, deploy, and manage high-quality models. It accelerates time to value with industry-leading machine learning operations (ML Ops), open-source interoperability, and integrated tools.

The challenges we are tackling within Microsoft finance are not unique. Every finance team is looking for ways to accelerate innovation and drive more efficient business impact. That is what makes this story so powerful—all the tools we used are available to everyone through Azure.

—David Koscheski, finance director and team lead, Intelligent Transformation Finance team

The platform is designed for responsible AI applications in machine learning. This was chosen because it enabled the team to still move quickly even with a custom model while ensuring complete governance, security, and it integrates directly into an ML Ops methodology.

Monitoring, Power Applications, and Microsoft Azure Database

Now that all the AI and ML needs were covered, ITF had to integrate these into a complete process workflow including a web interface, storage, and ongoing monitoring. For these elements we called upon the Microsoft Power Applications, Microsoft Azure Database services, and Microsoft Azure Monitor. Combined, these enabled us to quickly build out the flow and interfaces and covered all the scaling and infrastructure needs.

“The challenges we are tackling within Microsoft finance are not unique,” says David Koscheski, leader of the Intelligent Transformation Finance team. “Every finance team is looking for ways to accelerate innovation and drive more efficient business impact. That is what makes this story so powerful—all the tools we used are available to everyone through Azure.”

We are being challenged to do more with less but that does not mean we stop innovating. Investing in repeatable solutions like this to scale efficiencies that are cost effective and highly compliant is critical. With so many document and contract types within our business we have just begun to realize the full potential and savings.

—Gerard Morisseau, senior leader, Finance Applications

All businesses must process documents for various reasons. Our scenario was to address contract reviews, but there are many other document types where this sort of solution and technology can be applied. Our team has converted this internal solution into a platform and, with configuration, it can also be leveraged in various other scenarios. Think of the possibilities in finance, education, insurance, legal, retail, social services, travel and hospitality, utilities and so much more! Now think of the document scenarios in your business. Your company, most likely, has the in-house expertise to build a similar experience.

“We are being challenged to do more with less but that does not mean we stop innovating. Investing in repeatable solutions like this to scale efficiencies that are cost effective and highly compliant is critical,” says Gerard Morisseau, senior leader of our Finance Applications team. “With so many document and contract types within our business we have just begun to realize the full potential and savings.”

Learn more about Microsoft Azure and explore our suite of Azure products and services.

• Read more about digitizing contract management with microservices on Azure.
• Discover transforming how contract creation works at Microsoft with automation.
• Unpack shifting to paperless contract lifecycle management to help schools navigate COVID-19.

The post Scaling contract reviews at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure AI Services appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

To improve Microsoft Azure spend forecasting for our internal engineering teams in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), our FinOps team developed a dashboard that helps us provide our colleagues with guidance and course corrections. The tool highlights when spend and forecast don’t match, breaks down the data, and identifies opportunities for right-sizing and optimization.

By providing greater visibility and forecasting accuracy, the cloud FinOps dashboard improves efficiency and generates substantial budget savings, empowering our engineers to do more with less.

[See how we’re doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure. Learn about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation. Read more about moving Microsoft’s financial reporting processes to Microsoft Azure. Explore creating a modern data governance strategy to accelerate digital transformation at Microsoft.]

Prioritizing FinOps accuracy

Teams throughout MDEE leverage Microsoft Azure for many of their day-to-day tasks, and just like any budget expenditure, it’s important that their forecasting is as accurate as possible.

The FinOps Foundation identifies the maturity of an organization’s budgeting as the degree of variance between a forecasted budget and the actual spend, measured as a plus-or-minus percentage difference. Regardless of whether a spend is over or under a forecasted budget, the smaller the variance, the better a team is at forecasting its spend and the greater their FinOps maturity. Greater maturity leads to more efficiency and better budget allocation.

As members of the FinOps Foundation, we’re working to reduce our forecasting variance. The goal is to land in the top tier of FinOps maturity with a forecasting variance of less than 5 percent. Our FinOps team saw an opportunity to contribute to our overall maturity by tackling Microsoft Azure spend.

“We’re trying to solve problems that relate to these teams’ budget, forecasting, and optimization,” says Trey Morgan, principal program manager of MDEE Cloud FinOps. “Our job is either to show them solutions or make the data they need available so they can solve these issues themselves.”

Delivering on those goals demands tracking, transparency, and clear communication.

Visibility drives maturity

We combine several tools to display information in one user-friendly dashboard. On the back end, we leverage our internal source of truth for the organizational hierarchy and our budgeting and forecasting tools. We query our Microsoft Azure spend data and Microsoft Power BI provides the user interface. The result is a dynamic, easy-to-navigate dashboard that provides deep insights with just a few clicks.

Our cloud dashboard doesn’t just provide an all-up view of overall Microsoft Azure spend. FinOps users can drill down into different business hierarchies, then dive deeper into granular Azure spend on individual teams.

Most importantly, the tool tracks a team’s forecasting commitments alongside actual spend, predicting their trajectory for the rest of the fiscal year and displaying variance over or under their target.

When variance issues emerge, they get a notification and are asked to address their cost or forecast problem. Our dashboard even provides automated recommendations for cost-saving opportunities.

There’s an explanation behind any forecasting inaccuracy, some interesting story behind each of these services and the changes happening within them. This tool elevates those scenarios more effectively, and helps us dig deeper into why they’re happening.

—Paul Daly, principal software engineering manager, US Security and Compliance, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

What we’re trying to do is give them a one stop shop for budget and forecast details, and cost optimization recommendations all within one dashboard. These capabilities come together to help our internal customers track their variance and reduce the likelihood that unexpected cloud costs will occur.

“What we’re advocating for is, if you say you’re going to spend a specific amount of money, spend the money, and if you’re not spending what you thought, we want to give you information about why it’s happening,” Morgan says. “It’s a way to help teams meet the expectations they’ve set for themselves and agreed on with leadership.”

Telling the data story

Having access to Microsoft Azure spend information and partnering closely with engineering teams gives us insights into usage patterns as they emerge. The circumstances that drive forecasting variance aren’t always in a team’s control, but by understanding what leads to these patterns, FinOps tools can alert and advise their colleagues effectively.

“There’s an explanation behind any forecasting inaccuracy, some interesting story behind each of these services and the changes happening within them,” says Paul Daly, principal software engineering manager for US Security and Compliance within MDEE. “This tool elevates those scenarios more effectively and helps us dig deeper into why they’re happening.”

Understanding those stories gets results. Since launching the dashboard in October 2022, we’ve been using it to track Microsoft Azure budget forecasting and spend across 200 teams. In that time, we’ve driven more than $1 million in Azure savings by flagging budget issues and working with teams to right-size their spends.

At the moment, only our FinOps team and a few early adopters have direct access to the cloud dashboard. Those key team members leverage insights from the dashboard to support colleagues in driving accuracy and efficiency.

A lot goes into forecasting accuracy, and it’s a really good high level indicator of whether a team, a group, or an organization is healthy if they’re able to do what they say they’re going to do.”

—Heather Pfluger, general manager, Infrastructure and Engineering Services, MDEE

In the future, Microsoft Azure admins throughout our larger organization will be able to access the cloud FinOps dashboard directly and receive automated notifications when discrepancies arise. That will free FinOps professionals to focus on gathering information, tracking wider patterns, and telling even larger data stories.

The bottom line of better forecasting is budget savings. But it also speaks to the growing data discipline within Microsoft as a whole.

“As a company, we do a good job of identifying these savings opportunities, putting them in a database and then distributing that data to our engineering teams,” says Heather Pfluger, general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services. “A lot goes into forecasting accuracy, and it’s a really good high-level indicator of whether a team, a group, or an organization is healthy if they’re able to do what they say they’re going to do.”

Greater FinOps maturity is helping our technical teams make the most of their budgets by uncovering stories in their data. As a result, we’re discovering new ways to do more with less.

• Tracking is the key to FinOps maturity, so make sure you have the technology in place to make it possible.
• Pay attention to the look and feel of your dashboard to provide familiarity and encourage use.
• Break the desire to come in under budget. Accuracy is more valuable than underspend.
• Don’t leave teams to fend for themselves. Make your FinOps team genuine advisors and partners.
• Don’t aim for one-size-fits-all recommendations and include hard numbers in any recommendation.

• See how we’re doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.
• Learn about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation.
• Read more about moving Microsoft’s financial reporting processes to Microsoft Azure.
• Explore creating a modern data governance strategy to accelerate digital transformation at Microsoft.

The post Transforming our internal Microsoft Azure spend forecasting appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In today’s fast-paced business world, customer support is more important than ever. However, repetitive activities can take up valuable time and resources, leaving us little to focus on high-priority work.That’s where Microsoft Dynamics 365 and some strong doses of automation come in.

By using our first-party technology, we’re revolutionizing customer support within our Finance organization by automating repetitive work, allowing our customer service agents to focus on more important tasks.

“Digital transformation of Finance is a top priority for Microsoft,” says Vidya Sagar Mandapaka, a senior technical program manager on our Commerce Financial Services team. “Today we want to show you a good example of how we’re using our own technology to fuel that transformation.”

Up to now, our agents have had to hop on several different tools to gather data before they could respond to a customer inquiry about how much they might owe us for an outstanding bill. Around 40 percent of our agents’ time was spent on non-support activities.

Moving forward, all such repetitive customer inquiries will be handled automatically. No more manual preparation or delays. By using Microsoft Dynamics 365 to integrate with ERP systems like SAP, we’re improving both our internal and external stakeholders’ experiences.

“This automation not only improves our agent’s experience but also boosts overall productivity,” Vidya Sagar Mandapaka says. “We’re using technology to improve the customer experience and make our agents’ jobs easier. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”

Click through to watch our demo to see how we’re doing this.

Try Microsoft Dynamics 365 at your company.

• Discover Microsoft Sentinel and how we use it to protect our SAP workload.
• Explore how our Finance team combines feedback and sentiment analysis.
• Unpack how we used SQL Azure and Azure Service Fabric to rebuild a key internal app.

Share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Watch our demo: Automating repetitive tasks with Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When Dang recognized the manual process used by the Microsoft employees who access 1,300 company bank accounts in 191 countries, she wanted to streamline this largely manual process.

Not an engineer, she looked around for a non-technical solution and discovered Microsoft Power Automate, a cloud-based workflow solution for automating workflows across applications and services.

“We were empowered to do it ourselves, and do it efficiently,” says Dang, a senior treasury manager on Microsoft Treasury’s Global Cash Management team.

Best of all, no coding was required.

Dang worked with Brandon Diersch, a treasury group manager in Global Cash Management, to create a tool that would centralize online banking portals and track access requests.

“We didn’t need to work with engineering teams or have a coding background to create a tool,” Dang says. “We just needed some business logic and approval workflows. Once we had that designed and mapped out, we were able to implement the solution using Power Automate.”

[Learn how Microsoft builds connected business solutions with Power Automate. Learn how Microsoft transformed payroll processes with Power Automate. Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft used Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.]

Empowering citizen developers to solve problems on their teams

The Global Cash Management team began to learn how to use Power Automate through trial and error and used online courses and tutorials.

“We started by building simple flows before we made the business logic more complicated,” Dang says. “The major learning was that we needed to manually plan our logic before we built it out on Power Automate. This enabled us to identify the gaps in our processes before we started implementation.”

To develop this solution, Diersch’s team took advantage of Power Automate’s drag-and-drop technology.

“If you’ve ever created a slide in a PowerPoint deck and made simple animations to make the deck more polished, you can create a Power App,” says Pat Dunn, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital who designs, builds, and supports Power Apps. “You don’t need to know a programming language to begin, but you’re able to use the power of the platform to create low-code or even high-code solutions.”

Using Power Automate, Dang and Diersch created a centralized tool to evaluate whether an employee was active, manage access requests, and create a clear audit trail of who accesses a bank account and why.

“Due to the low-code, no-code capability of Power Automate, the life cycle was completed in a few weeks with no dependency on the IT team,” Dang says.

Using Power Automate made it easy for the team to scale the solution, integrate new business logic as the company expands, and receive error messages in a timely manner.

“Now, we not only have a clear audit trail of who has access, but also an approval workflow that’s been automated with this application,” Dang says. “This ensures that everyone who gets access to Microsoft accounts has an appropriate business justification.”

Prioritizing governance and security

The team also consulted the Microsoft Privacy team to ensure that their hand-built tool was certified.

“In conversations with compliance or audit groups, it became apparent that this tool offered a reliable, systematic way of logging changes and activity, especially when compared to a more manual tracking system,” Diersch says.

Diersch says that the team was able to iterate on the application in an agile way. For Dang and Diersch, the most rewarding part was building an improved experience for end users.

“We used Power Automate to pull in hierarchy information in an intelligent way and route them to the right people,” Diersch says. “This is how we used it specifically, but it can also be applied for any approval process.”

With this tool, the Treasury team receives tickets with all the information associated with an approval request, which has increased efficiency by 75 percent. If an employee leaves the company or switches teams, the Treasury team can also change the logic on the back end to add additional employees or restrict access.

“We’re seeing huge gains in the quality of the data,” Diersch says. “Our processing team receives clean and validated information, and it’s more efficient than receiving this data over email.”

Dang agreed, remarking on how fast the tool responds.

“If a treasurer has a question about who has access to Microsoft bank accounts, we can pull this data in seconds,” Dang says.

For teams who want to automate processes in their organization, Diersch recommends leveraging existing Power Automate templates and experimenting with different connectors.

“There’s such a big library, so there’s probably an existing flow that could be modified to address some of your business needs, or just provide a place to start,” Diersch says. “You can customize the rest.”

Power Automate is part of a larger suite of Power Platform apps that can be used to build end-to-end business solutions. To support the development of apps and flows, Power Platform users in small to medium-sized businesses can also take advantage of the Power Apps Center of Excellence starter kit.

“It connects users with the community and empowers them to be citizen developers with guardrails,” Dunn says.

Ultimately, Power Platform users like Dang and Diersch are embracing the power to meet their personal and team productivity needs, which benefits both IT and the company as a whole.

“From the IT professional side, make sure you have governance strategy, processes, and tooling so you can govern citizen development in your tenant,” Dunn says. “This enables you to build a thriving community where people are empowered to build productivity tools and make the organization more efficient.”

• Learn how Microsoft builds connected business solutions with Power Automate.
• Learn how Microsoft transformed payroll processes with Power Automate.
• Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft used Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.

The post How Microsoft used Power Automate to create its new centralized banking portal appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

He needed the software engineers to work differently, to say “yes” and take a risk. He needed the support of his leadership chain to be less risk averse. In short, he wanted to scrap everything and start over with software patterns that support taking greater yet responsible engineering risks.

Managers like Garg are playing a critical role in Microsoft’s ongoing bid to digitally transform how it builds the products and services it sells to customers, but also to transform how its employees tackle their work.

Garg talks about how his team used microservices, APIs, and other modern engineering tools to overhaul the Procure to Pay process, the official name for how Microsoft provides solutions to enable end-to-end financial functions like buying and paying for goods and services, but the real story is more human.

“None of this would have been possible if my team hadn’t bought in,” says Garg, a principal group engineering manager on the Finance Engineering Team in Microsoft Digital. “I introduced a startup culture—to every single leader on my team, I said ‘here’s your company, I need you to go figure out how to run it, to get it to grow.’ That really gave them a sense of ownership.”

That freedom is making a difference, says Vivek Chauhan, a principal software engineering manager and one of five managers who reports to Garg.

“He stands up for his people when they need him, and even when they do not ask,” Chauhan says. “Sahil has created a safe operating environment for his teams, and as a result, our engineers are really delivering. We really love working for him.”

Garg’s efforts are playing a pivotal part in an overall effort to transform how Microsoft Digital supports the company’s Finance Team, says Brad Wright, Garg’s manager and partner director of software engineering on the Microsoft Digital Finance Engineering Team.

“When I came to lead the engineering team for our finance systems, I came to transform everything we do going from old monolithic systems to modern cloud-based services,” Wright says. “To do that, I needed leaders who could transform themselves, their teams, and the work we do.”

To get there, the team needed to experiment to find the right path.

“Our procurement and payment systems afforded us the best opportunity with less risk than other areas, and Sahil was willing to take up the challenge,” Wright says. “As a leadership team we established a set of principles we would operate by—people oriented, tech oriented, and hardcore accountability and ownership. We established our focus on the end result and the end user in everything we do. This framework and his ability to establish a robust vision enabled Sahil to quickly transform his team and the systems he was entrusted with.”

That leap of faith laid the groundwork for a complete overhaul of Microsoft’s internal buying system. It also created a blueprint for how managers can drive transformation from deep inside of large corporations, something transformation experts say is pivotal for true digital transformation to occur.

“What Sahil is doing on the Finance Engineering team is a shining example of how we’re trying to drive transformation from the inside out across Microsoft,” says Michelle Emtman, a senior human resources manager at Microsoft. “He gives his team a lot autonomy, which encourages them to be really creative in how they do things. He’s created a safe environment for them to try new things, to always be learning, and to really enjoy the work that they do.”

Transforming procure-to-pay

When Garg inherited the procure-to-pay experience, it was made up of 36 standalone applications that each had their own user experience, functionality, and unconnected datasets. Many of these experiences were piled on top of each other, dumped into the same application because it was convenient, not because they were good matches. Other apps competed to do the same tasks, but with wildly different user experiences built on different technologies. The result? Confused users and an IT team that struggled to keep everything working.

All of that had to go.

Garg’s team carved all those legacy applications up, but before they could cut away everything extra, each of the engineers on the team had to be convinced to release their ownership of their part of the old system.

“Everyone needed to trust that taking a new approach was a good idea, and that there would be a role for them when we finished, one that might be different and challenge them in new ways,” Garg says. “Each of our engineers had to rethink what matters the most to our employees and external suppliers, and, with that always in mind, modernize and connect the services that they own.”

Once everything was cut away, the team determined that there were 16 distinct kinds of independent financial processes that Microsoft employees and suppliers execute to get their jobs done. They range from onboarding and selecting suppliers, employees procuring goods and services for their needs, and suppliers and partners getting paid for the services they deliver (each with compliance and service level agreement checks at all levels).

“We needed the new procure-to-pay experience to be built around those 16 discrete services,” Garg says. “We would build one overarching user experience layer that would make it feel like one, connected experience for our users no matter which of the 16 actions they needed to take.”

Using modern engineering nomenclature, each service would be known as a microservice, built on shared APIs, and all connected to one respective set of data so there would be only one version of the truth. Each of the 16 actions would have its own presentation layer and functions, but they all would have a similar look and feel so that the user would have a seamless and consistent experience no matter what they needed to buy.

Underneath the hood, each process would be given the space it needed as long as everyone played nice and talked to each other.

“Nobody’s code is a private code,” Garg says. “If one of our services needs to build something, anyone can pick that up from our service log backlog. We don’t want anyone spending effort on something that has already been done.”

When failure becomes an option

Traditionally in industry, the only way to try something new was to move to a new job.

“As a developer, I was restricted to what my team was doing,” Garg says. “There was no opportunity for me to do other things. I didn’t want that on my team. I wanted them to be able to try different things, to fail, and then to move on.”

Garg says he feels empowered by a culture shift underway across Microsoft Digital, his larger organization, and all of Microsoft at large. As part of that, his team has embraced modern engineering principles and adopted agile development methodologies.

“It started when we got great leaders in our org who gave us needed room to innovate and had us focus on modernizing our engineering practices,” he says. “Then when (Microsoft Chief Digital Officer) Kurt DelBene came on board, he stamped his message of approval on what we were doing. That gave us the motivation and the boldness that we needed, confirming that what we were thinking of was the right approach.”

And it’s working.

You don’t have to look farther than our huge set of manual processes and teams of people that the team had in place to help end users get through the company’s buying and getting paid scenarios.

“We have goal—if one person is doing it manually, then our tool isn’t working the way we want it to work,” Garg says. “We’re chasing that goal, but we’re not there yet.”

Garg’s team is now ready for its next big transformation, which is to move the procure-to-pay experience beyond the service model approach to a predictive model.

The goal is to use AI and machine learning to predict when tools are going to breakdown, to help employees figure out what they’re trying to do, and most importantly, to bring the right insights to our end users when and where they need them most to make good decisions.

And what about those teams who used to do all that manual work?

“Their roles are getting transformed,” Garg says. “They are getting re-skilled so they can help us analyze our data and build our machine learning models. They are getting to do higher value work.”

Enabling the operations team to move from doing manual, repetitive tasks to helping transform the procure-to-pay process is rewarding, but the bigger success is how much better the internal purchasing process now works, he says.

“If I look back where we were four years ago, If I was an employee, I deserved better,” Garg says.

Now it takes seconds to make purchases that used to take hours, even days.

“What I feel most satisfied by is that we have changed their lives,” Garg says of company employees, both those who make purchases and those who manage the programs that allow employees to buy stuff. “We have made both more productive. We have given them time back.”

• Read this case study on designing a modern service architecture for the cloud.
• Read this blog post on DevOps engineering practices.

The post How one Microsoft leader sparked an engineering team’s transformation appeared first on Inside Track Blog.