Business in 2023 is not easy. Every departmental or business leader is being asked to achieve more, and often with less resources. Companies are looking for ways to drive improvements, and don’t have time to wait.
I recently caught up with Tom Hoffman & Steven Amiott from our certified Formstack partner Crowe, on ways they have recently delivered significant ROI for customers with Formstack projects that have been delivered way faster than you might have thought possible.
The combination of expert resources like Crowe and no-code/low-code software like Formstack - is a combination that makes these rapid-ROI, silo-busting, work-acceleration projects possible.
Some common threads for these three customer scenarios:
- Siloed systems and data are often what plagues businesses. Using software like Formstack to work with your system of record (e.g. Salesforce) & replace legacy processes can be the key unlock to retiring legacy systems and eliminating data silo’s once and for all.
- Using highly configurable software like Formstack - as opposed to custom development - means projects can be delivered with significant time to value.
- Identifying processes that are ripe for improvement - creating a new process using Formstack - and doing it in a way that helped customer resources operate more efficiently and save time.
Use these three stories from Tom and Steven as inspiration:
#1: CoVerica Insurance Eliminates Data Silos with Document Automation
Internal Champion: Garrett Cooper, Director of Technology Innovation
CoVerica Insurance – a Texas-HQ insurance agency for homeowner insurance, car insurance and business insurance – made the move to an insurance agency management system built on Salesforce. The challenge they faced as part of this transition – as it often goes with new systems -- there was still a reliance on a legacy system due to specialized processes dependent on that legacy system.
Specifically, CoVerica still had a manual process to generate commercial certificates of insurance – needed for any new or renewed customers. This meant they were running their residential lines out of their new system and still running commercial lines in a legacy system - created silo’d data and process.
Sound familiar?
The data needed resided in Salesforce - the key was being able to generate highly specific Accord documents, driven from the data in Salesforce. That is where Formstack Documents came in.
Crowe configured the interface within Salesforce for agents to customize master certificates for named insureds, and flatten the policy data and coverage into a Formstack-ready Salesforce object. Over 500 fields from Salesforce are mapped to Formstack Documents to power the process, and generate these highly-specific documents with precise formatting.
Steve configured the Formstack Documents data route feature to bring in additional files as part of the document, and also control a customer-specific preference on how the certificate of insurance is delivered - via email, via mail, or fax (using Formstack Documents with Phaxio). Documents are generated in batch from Salesforce data, and routed using any of the three delivery methods.
The value immediately delivered is significant:
- Quality, consistent & trusted process - documents are completely accurate, precise data
- Significant time savings for team who before was having to do a lot of manual work spanning across multiple silo’d systems
- Retiring a legacy system meant cost savings and eliminate data silos
This also opens up the ability to further innovate - now that documents are available within Salesforce for each customer - to build out a customer portal to provide more self-serve tools to customers in the future.
Key Takeaways:
- Eliminating legacy systems has massive business value - saving people time, eliminating data discrepancies, accelerating work
- Even if a legacy process has a very specific output required, it’s worth spending the time to bring that process into your new system of record to unlock business value
#2: Deep Well Services
Internal Champion: Aaron Berarducci, VP of Operational Excellence
Deep Well Services (DWS) is an oilfield services company specializing in complex well work utilizing hydraulic completion units and workover rigs.
Due to the complexity and precision of their work, they are responsible for providing very detailed, daily activity logs to customers – for compliance, for visibility, and as backup material for all customer invoicing. Historically, this has been a combination of paper-based and disjointed digital processes creating challenges with data flow and reduced efficiency.
Deep Well took the decision to standardize on Salesforce as a single source of truth - and the key to the project was moving these processes to integrated and digital so that Salesforce could operate not only as a CRM for sales and services, but also power these operational processes to fully manage all of their operations up to and including inventory management, invoicing, credits and supply chain management.
That is where Formstack came in.
Using templates built in Formstack Documents, Crowe has setup all of these processes to now be data-driven from Salesforce:
- Sales proposals which include complex pricing sheets taking data from opportunities, products and grouping of those products and displayed in a way easy for customers to scan. Products are presented in different formats including line items and as bundles with bundle pricing.
- Daily job summaries and audit reports generated via Formstack sent to customers summarizing the past 24 hours of work. These include all all equipment used, items used and people who worked on the job - every service provided, hour worked and product consumed as a minute-by-minute activity log!
- When a well site is finished: the invoice that summarizes all charges from those daily logs.
- Additional finance documents including credit memos and purchase orders
From this Formstack automation, Deep Well has been able to retire legacy systems (and the associated cost) and say goodbye to paper-based processes and silo’d data. Salesforce is centralized as the single source of truth with Formstack as a critical capability to make it all possible.
This has all happened along Deep Well scaling their business to ensure work gets done more effectively as the business scales. Accounting and finance teams can now rely on data in a single source of truth, and trust the accuracy of their data since Formstack Documents uses that trusted database for all customer-facing documents.
Deep Well describes this as a digital transformation, but was able to see this happen for a fraction of the time or cost that many organizations may think digital transformation requires.
Key Takeaways:
- Standardizing on a single source of truth creates massive business value
- Data-driven document automation can often be the “secret sauce” to make that possible - generating the document customers and all departments need from a single database, is a key step to operationalizing a single source of truth
- Eliminating paper-based processes is crucial to any scaling business
#3: A Division of Global Fortune 500 Company Saves a Specialized FTE with Document Automation
Internal Champion: Sales Manager
New business efforts for this division are driven by highly detailed responses to requests for quotes from large manufacturing operations who are setting up new factories or warehouses. Every response has the potential to yield a multi-million $ initiative, but also needs a large volume of technical parts configurations.
Traditionally these responses require a very senior sales application engineer resource to prepare these documents. As the volume continued to grow based on the success of the division, this precious resource became a bottleneck. The sales application engineer is a specialized resource which did not easily scale and was confined simply based on number of hours in a workday.
To change this status quo, this Fortune 500 company worked with Crowe to build out a data-driven document generation solution using Formstack Documents. There is now a guided process to capture the information, based on business rules. The documents are output using a mix of pre-formatted content, conditional content driven out of Salesforce, and create responses 25-50 pages in length.
The output includes tables of information – dependent based on the category of response – and within the tables products are grouped. Text is populated conditionally to ensure technical precision in the response.
Upon launching this new process, the sales team was able to automate a process and save an entire FTE sales application engineer resource. The 3-month implementation work with Crowe and a multi-year license cost with Formstack returned immediate ROI for the business - the project had paid for itself in less than six months while allowing the team to continue to scale without resource constraints. That is what we mean by “time to value.”
Key Takeaways:
- Look for processes whereby a constrained resource can be made more effective
- Processes involving a lot of business rules/logic are ripe for automation
- The combination of expert resource (Crowe) & no-code & low-code software (Formstack) means significant time to value, and resulting projects deliver immediate ROI
Want to hear more from Formstack and Crowe?
If you will be at Dreamforce in a few weeks, join us on Wednesday, September 13th at 9:30 AM PST for a power-packed breakfast session where we will demonstrate how Formstack can accelerate your organization's speed to value. Customers (like above!) will be sharing their success stories of harnessing these innovative strategies for exceptional results. Save your seat now!
