FLSmidth Automation

Business background

FLSmidth is a leading supplier of equipment and services to the global cement and minerals industries, with more than 15,000 employees in over 50 countries. The company’s project managers and engineers develop, plan, design, install and service equipment to discerning clients all over the world, with a focus on exceeding expectations.

Since it’s humble beginnings in 1882, FLSmidth has become an empire by focusing on key objectives—promoting continual improvement of quality and business processes, providing the tools needed to support quality improvements—and incorporating these principles into the business processes of all FLSmidth companies. To ensure this, FLSmidth looks for solutions that streamline the business processes of its engineers and project managers.

Challenges

Five years ago, the project management teams at FLSmidth Automation migrated from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft SharePoint platform to manage all project-related documentation and correspondence. SharePoint gave the organization a new, comprehensive way to store, share and find information.

For FLSmidth Automation’s Quality Manager, Mr. Torben Gregersen, this new capability helped streamline the efforts of project management teams across the organization and across all departments.

“Project management at FLSmidth Automation is very complex and involves many levels of communication. SharePoint allows us to store everything together so it’s possible to see the full picture of a project, including documentation, specifications, blueprints and the technical levels involved in the project. Without SharePoint, the information would be siloed. To pull up specific information, we would need to search for individual elements and as such, we would lose the full picture that we’re able to get by using SharePoint.”

But for FLSmidth Automation, some inherent limitations of SharePoint meant that project managers were unable to get the most out of the platform.

Mr. Gregersen explained, “Email is the way in which information is passed from person-to-person in our organisation. Staff correspond daily with stakeholders in mining, engineering and cement industries about projects being developed for specific clients and companies across the globe. SharePoint, for all its capability, did not really allow us to capture email content effectively. We became concerned that information relating to projects might be getting locked in emails and email attachments.”

Working with OnePlace Solutions

When the organization realized that Microsoft did not offer effective tools to secure and manage the information in email correspondence, FLSmidth Automation began to look elsewhere for a way to integrate that capability with SharePoint.

Mr. Gregersen added, “We started looking for a solution like OnePlaceMail to ensure that our business processes were the best they could possibly be, because our focus on quality and improvement is a point of distinction for our business. Although we found competitors to OnePlaceMail, in the end OnePlaceMail was the most professional and robust solution for our large scale project-oriented requirements.

The Information Department was the first to have OnePlaceMail installed and to date, 150 employees are using OnePlaceMail to track, store and share project information. OnePlaceMail provides a central location that both technical and commercial personnel can use to save and locate all project information. The result has been improved collaboration and greater compliance.

This initial implementation phase has been so successful that Mr. Gregersen expects the number of users to increase in the next couple of months. “We are looking to move into a second phase of implementation so we can double the number of users with access to OnePlaceMail,” said Mr. Gregersen. “Next year, we will look to roll it out globally in line with upgrading SharePoint throughout the organization.”

Delivering Results

Marrying OnePlaceMail with SharePoint allowed FLSmidth Automation to get the best out of their Microsoft SharePoint investment while also helping the organization to stay true to its guiding principals of providing quality management through innovative business processes.

“The biggest advantage of using OnePlaceMail has been the ability to consistently capture the date and time stamps of when something was forwarded to a client,” said Mr. Gregersen.

“It’s important that this information is archived in case of disputes. We also need to make sure that we are complying with all legal requirements. OnePlaceMail has allowed us to capture accurate records with metadata for both emails and email attachments.”

Mr. Gregersen continued, “OnePlaceMail is also helping with our user engagement and adoption of SharePoint because it delivers SharePoint capabilities within the familiar Microsoft Outlook interface. And the easier management of email attachments with OnePlaceMail allows users to send links to content, so they don’t have to send out large attachments.”

“Basically, it makes project management and compliance much easier and more streamlined—that’s essential for our business.”