Overview

Founded in 1942 Oxley Group specializes in the design and manufacture of electronic and electro–optic systems and components. Oxley Group has two subsidiary companies: Oxley Developments Company Ltd in the UK and Oxley Inc in the USA. Oxley Inc. is a privately owned US incorporated business founded in California in 1976 to supply electronics components to the defense and aerospace market.  

Challenges/Goals

Oxley Group’s business and manufacturing departments had large number of manual processes and the attendant inefficiencies that come with those processes. Compounding these difficulties was the fact that Oxley Group is a global organization with multiple locations even within a single region, causing communication bottlenecks, making improvement of the manual processes even more difficult. The directors at Oxley approached these problems by requesting a solution to replace the manual processes, address their document management requirements with a critical emphasis on business process automation. Business intelligence was also stated as a requirement for any solution to allow decision makers to respond more rapidly to the needs of the organization and their global customers.

• Automate numerous manual processes
• Improve regional and global communications
• Provide process and business analytics
• Replace and improve document management solutions 

Solution/Approach

Synergy Consultants and Business Analysts worked with all of the departments within Oxley Group to identify their manual processes and to gain an intimate understanding of their document management and business intelligence requirements. It became clear during this collaborative discovery that Microsoft SharePoint and Nintex Workflow were the ideal technologies to take the ideas for improvement and realize them in an easy-to-use toolset.

Synergy designed an end-to-end solution focused on a SharePoint intranet, Microsoft InfoPath forms for data gathering with Nintex Workflows automating Oxley’s many manual processes. These workflows would replace the manual processes and gave directors, managers, and decision makers improved analytics on these processes ensuring that they had valuable insight into the businesses departments and ongoing requirements.

• Implement a SharePoint collaboration portal
• Replace numerous manual processes with Nintex Workflows
• Leverage built-in SharePoint communication and document management functionality
• Provide BI solutions through business process analytics for managers and decision makers

Results

Since implementing and launching SharePoint and over twelve Nintex Workflows, Oxley almost immediately realized a return on their investment in SharePoint and Nintex technologies. The manual processes are now efficient, measurable workflows that have greatly reduced the time it takes to complete the process with the added benefit that they can be tracked while in progress. Because of this automation integrating with SharePoint communication capabilities, these processes are handled effectively and rapidly regardless of the users’ physical location, all but eliminating the communication bottlenecks.

Having developed historical analytical data on these processes, Oxley Group has been able to improve efficiency in their procurement, manufacturing, and shipping processes helping them to become more responsive to their global customer base.

Oxley’s adoption of Nintex Workflows and SharePoint document management has replaced several expensive and labor intensive line-of-business systems with an easy-to-use web based intranet accessible by all users within the organization, reducing their infrastructure support requirements and licensing costs.

• Automated workflows replaced a multitude of manual processes
• Improved departmental efficiency through automation and analytics
• Eliminated communication bottlenecks and improved global responsiveness
• Simplified document management and business processes by orders of magnitude