Four Applications Forming the Base of Company Transformation

Business continuity has become every organization’s top priority with the recent escalation of the Covid-19 situation. Everyone is consumed with the possibility that they might not be able to sustain operations after orders to work from home have been officially circulated. Survival is on everyone’s agenda, and to survive, you need to diminish any contingencies that may affect operations.

Employees are every business’s most important asset. If your employees are not able to perform jobs or submit requests that require a chain of approvals, you might be heading down a dark road of less productivity, slow operations, no achievement, and incurring losses.

Among the many challenges we have seen organizations struggle with after implementing “remote working”, the biggest challenge yet has been the disruption of operations due to the absence of people to approve requests submitted by employees and to “keep processes flowing”. What happens when your approvers are physically inaccessible?

• Processes are disrupted and come to a complete stop as approvers cannot be reached
  
• Delays and confusion occur as documents are passed from one approver to another via email
  
• Loss of ownership over approvals, causing a chaotic work environment

We believe we have what you need to not only survive, but to also maintain a normal pace of operations and eliminate factors that will disrupt them.

While we at Exceed did not necessarily anticipate Covid-19, we did however, anticipate a shift in operating models. We have been implementing a remote working model since 2014 when we detected patterns in where the business world was heading. To support our vision, we created numerous solutions that will sustain our remote working model, one of which is the Enterprise Submission Platform a.k.a ESP for Employee Service Catalogue & Digital Approvals.  

ESP is a process automation system that empowers business users to create and manage their processes, without having to rely on IT staff to get the job done. As it is easy to use with little to no training, this reduces the time needed to go live and the cost required to maintain and manage the system. This model will make the process of approving employee requests while working remotely much easier to control, track, and manage.

How exactly will it solve remote working challenges?

Step 1:

We will help you map your old traditional approval processes on the system

Step 2:

We will train your business users on how to use the system and create processes, remotely

Step 3:

We will support you in creating new processes that meet the demands of remote working

Our focus with ESP is to provide you with a business process automation solution that can automate all your processes that are currently handled manually and that require approvals, to help alleviate any remote working costs that your business will take on.

While we maintain our promise listed above, we understand that customers may have some underlying questions regarding the solution and so we’ve compiled what we anticipate would be the most common ones:

For more information on ESP, feel free to contact us here.

You see the  end product  but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it! 

We sat down with Hanadi Sidawi, product manager of one of our most popular solutions “SimpleStrata” to get to know her more and understand her journey to becoming  SimpleStrata’s product manager. 

Hanadi graduated from Abu Dhabi University with a degree in computer science and a minor in business administration. Her professional career was kicked off when she became a trainer for basic computer courses. She then shifted into another company, where she worked as a legal assistant for 1 year and then got promoted to senior legal assistant, maintaining that position for 2 more years.

With that kind of experience under her belt, she was able to join Exceed as an HR Coordinator where her focus was on internal policies and labor law compliance in Exceed’s different branches. After some time, the bulk of work was getting more focused on employee performance. To familiarise herself with its methodologies and the system handling it, she began the process of self-teaching and read books to study the main frameworks that formulate the basis of Employee Performance Management and Strategy Execution.

That way, she become proficient in the language that provisions the performance solution that Exceed was developing and was working as a performance specialist implementing the methodology of employee performance in Exceed. As she worked more closely with SimpleStrata, she became proficient in it, which lead the way for her to become the product manager. 

By getting more exposed to customers, Hanadi and the team came to know that the challenges that Exceed faced internally were common across almost all organisations from different industries. 

Exceed had the methodologies but faced a challenge in communicating, implementing, and executing them the right way, as did the other organisations. 

These challenges included: 

After the system had reached the desired level of maturity, it was launched in Exceed first then to the market and was able to resolve the 99% of the challenges of many organisations, regardless of their size/industry. 

Want to know more about the methodologies behind  SimpleStrata?
Click here. 

Success Stories 

One of our larger customers, SCAMAF (Social Care & Minor Affairs Foundation) were using excel sheets to manually monitor and execute their strategy, which was not only very time-consuming, but it was also exhausting the efforts of employees involved who can be utilising their time in other more efficient tasks. Not only that, but the end result would usually have inaccuracies as human error is guaranteed with repetitive tasks such as this one. 

What the SimpleStrata team did was they helped them migrate all their data, which was a huge number of excel files, into the system. They set up the system according to SCAMAF’s execution process, and they provided them with the required training to be able to understand and use the system.

They immediately were satisfied with the system as it had created the perfect environment for them that does not require human intervention. After using the system, they had clear visibility on individual performance as well as organisational performance. Whereas they previously had a full department dedicated to strategy execution, they now had only the Head of Strategy monitoring everything via SimpleStrata. 

Statement from the SimpleStrata team: 

Since we launched it to the market in 2019, we reduced the time and efforts of  20+ organisations with 3,000 employees across numerous industries:  50% decrease in the time required for collecting performance data & 40% increase in employees’ awareness on their goals and KPIs.

Intrigued? Click here for a FREE trial! 

If you are currently struggling with a process workflow that doesn’t necessarily ‘flow’, you are not alone. From our extensive experience with customers from different countries and across various sectors, we realised that there had been a serious hurdle that is holding back companies from achieving highest efficiency in their business operations.  

All organisations, whether they are SMEs or huge conglomerates, have processes in place to achieve their business objectives. These processes require a significant amount of resources, system infrastructure, & personnel. 

What’s happening is that as this world is almost fully transforming into a digital one, carrying out those processes manually becomes more of a setback than anything else.

Team members become burned out from repetitive tasks, requests get stuck with personnel who are unable to respond for different reasons, issues in processes go undetected and cannot be traced to a source, and as a result, the completion of processes is delayed and efficiency is hindered.   

While the above factors pose powerful arguments for adopting an automation solution, there needs to be a certain level of discipline to overcome obstacles that may come in the way. These obstacles can mainly be related to cost or people.  

Cost poses a major question mark when wanting to undergo such a transformation, whether it’s a financial or opportunity cost. While business owners may have oppositions due to the costs of implementing an automation software, they will eventually learn that costs savings are along the way in the long run. 

However, companies that have taken the first step towards finding the right automation solution should understand that cost savings are not the primary reason to automate processes but rather to improve service to end users. With an improved quality of service, the operational costs associated will also improve and thus companies will achieve their ROI.  

We created “The Enterprise Submission Platform” (ESP) keeping in mind the most common customer pain points including:  

• Lagging of operations due to inefficiencies in workflow 
• High cost of doing things manually 
• Lack of task ownership  

• Slow delivery of projects  

ESP is a linear workflow system that was created by the Exceeders team to enable function owners that want to automate their business processes more control over creating and managing these processes in a guaranteed short period of time. 

The best part is that the task of managing and updating any feature in ESP can be done by the business users themselves, so this eliminated the need to involve the IT Department or even the IT Service Provider in maintaining and updating the system. 

Want to learn more about how you can cut costs and boost operational efficiency?

CLICK HERE