Elly Yates-Roberts |
Busy Bees Asia’s IT team understands the importance of managing processes. The childcare and early education provider, part of the global Busy Bees Group, has been steadily growing since the organisation’s expansion to Asia in 2014.
Jordan Yap, IT director at Busy Bees Asia, oversees the firm’s IT needs for over 2,000 employees. These include teachers and educators, as well as support and administration staff, and each require varying technology based on their role. Yap and his team manage the company’s infrastructure, enterprise apps, e-learning and security, as well as IT provisioning, which ensures employees have access to the technology they need to do their jobs.
“We originally built a solution on InfoPath to manage provisioning requests for our users,” said Yap. “It worked but there were constraints as we introduced new digital workplace tools and the reach was limited to headquarters users. Any changes for staff located at our learning centres had to be managed manually.”
As Busy Bees Asia has continued to grow in the region, so has the demand for the technology tools that Yap and his team support. The organisation needed more powerful and comprehensive solutions to help it scale its digital workplace solutions.
With guidance from Amin Talebi, managing director at SRKK Consulting, a Nintex partner, Busy Bees Asia evaluated Nintex. They realised its user-friendly interface and responsive forms could provide the solution they needed.
“One of the main challenges we had to address was scalability as we continue to grow across the region – it is an imperative condition for this process and others we choose to adopt,” said Yap. “Once Nintex was introduced, we knew we had a solution to the issue at hand.
“Nintex Forms had a ‘wow’ factor and naturally, the better the forms, the more likely people can follow the process effectively.”
Yap attended a Nintex training session which provided more confidence and reinforced the decision. “The learning curve is much shorter and I was surprised how quickly skilling up on Nintex could be,” said Yap.
Busy Bees Asia’s InfoPath solution was also limited as it only managed the first part of the process on receiving provisioning requests. Once they received the requests, Yap’s team had to manually assign licenses. The requests for staff at its childcare centres had to submit requests via a help desk ticket and then be manually provisioned one by one.
Thanks to support from SRKK Consulting and using Nintex Forms and Workflow, the end-to-end process at all Busy Bees Asia locations and its headquarters is now standardised and automated. When an existing or new employee needs licensing, an online form is completed by the user, manager or human resources. The request is sent to applicable stakeholders to approve, and once approved, Nintex creates user accounts and assigns the license. There is now visibility into status across the entire process, so stakeholders know when tasks are completed or when there’s a bottleneck.
This solution also ensures that new employees have access to everything they need to do their jobs on their first day. Busy Bees has eliminated human error and improved the speed of this process down to just three business days. Nintex also keeps things moving – if the request is waiting for approval, the workflow will send reminders to stakeholders until its complete.
The same process is also used when people change roles or leave the company. HR completes another online form, sets the departure or change date, and the Nintex workflow will disable the account based on the submission from HR.
“Leveraging Nintex Forms and Workflow for this solution has created a more productive and secure process, improved communications and visibility, and streamlined our use of process automation,” said Yap.
Since Busy Bees Asia implemented the Nintex Solution to support its account provisioning, Yap and his team are identifying more opportunities for process automation. They plan to leverage Nintex RPA, the company’s robotic process automation offering, for their next solution to support external facing requirements with regulatory stakeholders. This is a complicated and manual process that will benefit from automation that is highly secure.
“As we continue to scale, we need to simplify complex business processes and build solutions that bring our business units together,” said Yap. “We’re constantly asking ourselves how should we leverage Nintex and automation to drive efficiency?”
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.