Case Study
Industry
Manufacturing
Location
Germany
Size
5500 employees
"Since implementing harmon.ie, we have more documents in SharePoint – particularly in purchasing, but also across the entire organization."
Summary
A global company founded in the 1950s, MAPAL has been at the forefront of technological innovation in the manufacturing sector for decades; having now grown to dominate markets in over 20 countries worldwide. Like any global company, keeping employees around the world on the same page is a challenge - particularly when it comes to storing contractual information in a way that is accessible across the organization.
The partnership with harmon.ie allowed MAPAL to get the maximum value from their SharePoint environment; recording information on every aspect of their contract management processes in a single repository.
About MAPAL
MAPAL is a global provider of tools and solutions for the manufacturing industry. The company consists of over 5,500 employees worldwide, distributed across 40 different branches and subsidiaries in 25 countries.
MAPAL is an organization that prides itself on being at the forefront of the digital workplace. It takes advantage of machine learning and IoT technology when creating solutions; the company is constantly searching for new ways to improve business IT in everyday working life. With so many offices in different locations, seamless global collaboration is one of the most important challenges facing MAPAL. To improve this, they moved from an on-premises LOTUS Notes environment to SharePoint two years ago. It’s only when they combined this with harmon.ie that they began to realize the full potential the intranet environment provided.
Disconnected systems
Like many global companies, managing contracts at MAPAL is a vital part of everyday operations. To achieve this, the company is increasingly leveraging SharePoint for contract management as it creates a centralized repository of information that all users can access. This ensures that relevant workers always have access to a comprehensive log of all contract-based information.
MAPAL relies on Outlook as their primary method of communicating with clients and vendors. For the Purchasing Department in particular, problems began to arise when contracts were saved centrally in SharePoint, but the related email correspondences were siloed in individuals’ Outlook inboxes. Clearly, a solution was needed which would allow them to seamlessly move emails into the relevant SharePoint folder.
Seamless contract management
Users at MAPAL were already familiar with harmon.ie’s potential to integrate Outlook and SharePoint. Once they had identified their problem, harmon.ie emerged as the clear solution.
With harmon.ie, correspondences and contract information of all kinds can be seamlessly preserved in the appropriate SharePoint folder. The solution sits inside Outlook, meaning users simply drag and drop emails from Outlook into harmon.ie for the SharePoint-based contract management environment to be seamlessly preserved.
harmon.ie prompts users to add the appropriate metadata when saving email information. This means that once emails and attachments are captured in SharePoint, it is easy for other users to locate them.
The Results
harmon.ie makes it easy for MAPAL to keep all their contract-based information in the right place. It allows everybody in the organization to work from the same page, maintaining a single version of the truth across the entire workplace environment. For example, users looking to view a vendor contract in SharePoint can also access a comprehensive history of relevant email-based interactions with that same vendor.
Enabling collaboration
SharePoint is one of the most popular tools for enabling collaboration within organizations. Yet email remains the primary medium for communication with external clients and vendors. This means that for organizations everywhere, vital communications, and documents from clients are trapped in Outlook, segregated from the SharePoint environment. Bringing this information into SharePoint allows users to seamlessly access comprehensive, up-to-date information always.
With harmon.ie, integrating vital information into SharePoint is not only possible, it’s easy. The simple drag-and-drop functionality has allowed organizations everywhere to get the maximum value from their SharePoint environment and improve the productivity of their workforce along the way. By bringing Outlook information into SharePoint, harmon.ie allows organizations to complete the final link in the chain, creating a unified IT environment that encourages efficiency and productivity in every aspect of working life.
A revolution in information management
Since rolling out harmon.ie, MAPAL has seen a significant rise in the number of documents that are shared into SharePoint. Case in point; within the Purchasing Department, the effortless drag and drop functionality has been instrumental in encouraging uptake of SharePoint as a document management solution.
Users across the organization have reported an end to disconnected file systems, with important business content no longer being siloed away in the inboxes of individual users. The process of saving information in SharePoint is much easier and more responsive than adding documents via the traditional SharePoint browser interface.
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