Consulting firm gets seamless visibility and speed

 |   Microsoft NZ News Centre

Male IT professional at desk with multiple devices, chatting on teams with a headset.

Voco is a business consultancy that helps enterprises throughout New Zealand get better answers to business challenges. The consultancy is a close-knit team centred on collaboration and trust, and since 2001, it has been in the business of digital transformation for clients who grapple with the ongoing digital evolution.

The need for simplified business processes

Data and insights are the lifeblood of consultancy work, and Voco makes it a point to constantly optimise its data management policies and processes. For more effective oversight, it knew it needed a hub for all documents and collaboration.

One hub to rule them all

Staying true to its principle of embracing new technology, Voco implemented Microsoft Teams soon after its launch. Once launched, Voco quickly found it could gain visibility over all collaboration and communication in one shared and secure space. Microsoft Teams now serves not only as the hub for all documentation and collaboration but also as the platform within which Microsoft applications like Power BI, PowerApps, Logic Apps and Microsoft Flow or MyAnalytics can be accessed. “It’s all linked into Teams,” shares Voco partner Dudley Harris.

More visibility into the consulting workflow

Analysis and creating reports are part and parcel of consulting, and this is one area Microsoft Teams has facilitated with its integration of Power BI. “We use Power BI to pull all the data around a team, for example detailed Power BI dashboards that visualise client data. We also use Power BI to help manage teams, including how many guest users are on that team. That means I can go in to Microsoft Teams as a team owner, and see all teams we have in our organisation, use Power BI to pull all the relevant data for a team, click on a user and see all the teams they are in, and the people who have the latest access to those teams,” says Dudley. “Because there’s a lot of confidentiality needed, it’s important that we operate on a need-to-know basis. So, Microsoft Teams allows us to manage and get visibility across our teams.”

Faster productivity from day one

Voco is still growing its team but onboarding new hires can sometimes be slower than an organisation expects. For Voco, it has found its answer in Microsoft Teams providing the front door to Automations built from Power Apps and Flow to onboard users. What used to be a potentially tedious process has been simplified. “It now takes us a few minutes and doesn’t cost us anything. Previously it took us a week or two, costing us anywhere between $1,000 to $2,000,” says Dudley. “If I’ve got a new user that’s starting then, via Teams, I can click on a link, on one of the tabs, and I’ve got all the automation that we’ve created to add a user with workflow so that the selected HR manager has final approval. As a team owner, I can now see all the teams from the organisation, click on a person, and see all the teams they own.”

Another area in which management can be a challenge is finance and operations. “We make key business decisions every day, bill every month, and bring on new talent on a regular basis. As we are an agile organisation we collaborate a lot—talking to different people from across the business,” Dudley explains. “Now, instead of having to search for files, or to figure out what’s going on, people get up and going pretty quickly.”

Streamlined for savings and sanity

Voco has saved 20% of its time by automating business processes ranging from document management to HR, all with Teams as the interface. The ease and consistency of collaboration, as well as the ability for multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously, from anywhere, have benefitted Voco immensely.

The use of Microsoft Teams has been so intuitive and effective that Voco has shifted to a more fast-flowing approach to communication. “People don’t need to use any other tools. In fact, some of our people only have to check their email two or three times a week, because they’re just not relying on email anymore,” says Dudley.

Voco’s belief in Teams has led it to create Teams evangelists, its own internal advocates. They guide employees on how to simplify their business processes with Teams. The result is more efficient client engagement, streamlined workflows, and more productivity —making them more competitive and saving clients money.

“When you look at Teams, a lot of people think it’s just a way to collaborate. But when you take the whole power of the platform, you can effectively automate a lot of standard business processes,” says Dudley.

Designing a formula for consulting success in the cloud

Voco has saved as much as 80% of its IT costs with the implementation of Teams. “Teams has been so successful for our business that we now use Voco as a case study with our clients, we are now Teams evangelists for our clients and help them accelerate their adoption,” says Dudley.

To provide more value its clients, Voco is exploring how it can best use Azure Data Services to power its consulting engagements to the next level, one that is formulaic. “What we’re looking at now is Azure Data Services. We’re starting to use Azure tools to structure the way we go about our work,” says Dudley.

 

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