Summary
What do you do? Describe your company.
NDT Global is a leading supplier of ultrasonic pipeline inspection robotics and integrity services solutions. Its state-of-the art inspection robotic fleet provides the entire ILI (In-Line Inspection) service spectrum for onshore and offshore pipelines worldwide. The full range of services includes; geometry and deformation inspection, metal loss and crack inspection, defect assessment and fitness-for-purpose investigations. We boast a skilled engineering and project management team, complemented by one of the best data analysis teams in the industry. The company has offices in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, UAE, UK and USA.
Challenge
What was your problem, and what challenges prevented you from easily solving the problem?
We are a small IT department, but we are getting a lot of requests for different solutions from many departments. Requirements are not always easily realizable using standard SharePoint features (locked columns, different forms during the process, etc.). We would have spent a lot of time to develop these highly specific applications. So we have decided to look for a customizable solution based on SharePoint to be able to quickly build the required applications.
How did you find out about our solution? Did you consider other providers? What criteria did you use to select BPA and Microsoft?
The former administrator has selected and integrated BPA’s solutions with our SharePoint 2013 system. Since 2015, it was used to deliver many solutions/applications with a high level of satisfaction from end users. The decision to continue using it after our migration to SharePoint Online was logical.
What was the solution? How did it address your challenges?
We are using BPA Solution Builder, which allows us to rapidly implement applications for our teams, like robot maintenance plans (each robot is entered in the app with a maintenance plan); a CAPA system; a document center for controlled documents including workflows and extensive use of filters to retrieve the needed documents. Project teams are using an app to retrieve customer information. The actual project module will be reshaped soon to take advantage of the new BPA modules.
Strategy
How did you implement the solution? How long did it take? What new challenges did the implementation create?
The solution was built with the help of a BPA partner in Germany. The first implementation was very quick – a couple of weeks – after on site training sessions. The solution was first implemented in our SharePoint 2013 environment. After the Office 365 migration, it has been decided to migrate applications from on premises to the cloud and rebuild BPA interfaces and forms from scratch. This was done to be able to modify some features and standardize all applications.
Results
What results did you gain from BPA Solutions – both anecdotally and measurably?
Since we have been using SharePoint at NDT, internal departments have been asking us for applications to store data. First, we have delivered users with simple SharePoint lists with no real logic and no specific forms. Departments have entered a bunch of data in these apps, but we had no common process in place, and the quality of data was not as good as expected.
Thanks to BPA tools and conditional forms (that can be displayed depending on the state of the item), we could make different persons responsible for their data and achieve better data quality.
As a real measurable benefit, we could drastically reduce the time needed to create a solution. It is now much easier to configure an app (including BPA forms + SharePoint workflows) from creation to completion with BPA Solution Builder than with SharePoint alone. We have noticed that the implementation time was divided by 3, sometimes by 4.
The installation/deployment was super easy. It took us 4-8 hours until we were able to create solutions with BPA Solution Builder on SharePoint Online. The use of the solution is very intuitive and we really like it. It is very well accepted by end users.
Source: https://www.bpa-solutions.net/case-studies/ndt-global/
