Challenge
At Verwater, collecting various documents such as material certificates, work procedures (WPS), and procedure qualifications (PQR), related to the technical drawings made for each project, involved many manual and time-consuming steps. While the necessary documents were digitally stored in a shared network folder or a SharePoint library, gathering these files required a lot of data entry and searching. Additionally, there was no real automated status tracking per drawing or project. Finally, completed files were delivered to clients in various ways (e.g., WeTransfer, OneDrive, memory stick, etc.), which reduced the consistency and efficiency of the process.
Desired solution
To address these shortcomings and to allow for further expansions in the future, it was decided to develop an application for this purpose. The aim of this application is to automate as many steps of the existing process as possible while keeping the remaining manual actions as recognizable as possible (i.e., as identical as possible to the existing procedures). The application will also be further developed in the future to automate tasks such as tracking the status of drawings and projects, automatically collecting other documents like welding certificates, etc.
Technology
Microsoft 365 is being utilized as the platform, with a specific implementation on SharePoint Online. Skybow was employed for creating the data model, customizing forms, and setting up workflows. Additionally, a custom Web API hosted on Azure handles the complex logic for certificate retrieval.
Result
Thanks to the implementation of automatic certificate retrieval, the process is now much smoother. The automatic processing also results in fewer errors and, most importantly, a significant time savings.
