Overhauling Power Platform to streamline processes and enhance compliance

Novo Nordisk, a Danish multinational company that specializes in the production and marketing of pharmaceutical products and services, employs more than 64,000 people globally and markets its products in 168 countries. Since 2023, Novo Nordisk has expanded its partnership with HCLTech, increasing its Microsoft Power Platform licenses from 7,000 to 70,000, making HCLTech its largest Power Platform partner.

The Challenge: Novo Nordisk faced several hurdles managing its document routing and compliance systems. The company’s manual document routing system (DRS), crucial for legal documentation, relied on emails, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Similarly, the compliance experience was cumbersome, with decentralized systems impeding efficiency. Novo Nordisk needed a solution that could streamline these processes, improve the user experience and ensure compliance — all while retaining each department’s autonomy.

The Objective: The primary goal was to overhaul Novo Nordisk’s existing Power Platform system to address these challenges, focusing on:

• Launching a new DRS for efficient, accurate document management
• Creating a one-stop compliance hub that centralizes compliance requirements, supports GxP pharmaceutical requirements and ultimately makes life easier for employees
• Enhancing companywide collaboration while respecting Novo Nordisk’s preference to keep departments autonomous

The Solution: HCLTech delivered three game-changing solutions.

• DRS Online: A comprehensive solution built on the Microsoft Power Platform features an application for enhanced user experience, an app to manage and report on data, a Dataverse app for storage, Power Automate to automate approval flows via Microsoft Outlook and Teams and SharePoint integration for managing request documents.
• Ethics & Compliance (E&C) Hub: Integrated with Open AI through a custom portal on Dataverse, the E&C Hub offers capabilities like summarization and context-based search to support compliance needs. The Hub also supports GxP compliant apps to ensure compliance with global pharmaceutical standards.
• Managed Services: Centralized Power Platform support and enhancements from HCLTech foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing across business units.

The Impact: Benefits of the new Power Platform system include:

• DRS Online: Processing times reduced from weeks to days. An enhanced UX improves automated request submissions by allowing users to manage and track requests. Integration with Teams and Outlook saves significant time.
• E&C Hub: Advanced search capabilities and centralized access to key compliance data are easier to access and more user-friendly.
• Managed Services: HCLTech helps diverse units within Novo Nordisk to operate more cohesively. HCLTech’s Managed Services team also works to enhance apps and processes via regular updates.

Using AI to provide expectant mothers with answers fast

The Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), a non-profit academic medical center with a century-long history of providing exceptional patient care, research and education, began a genetic counseling study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study aims to empower expectant mothers with accurate, unbiased and medically sound information through an interactive chatbot, eliminating the need to tap into potentially unreliable sources, such as “Dr. Google.”

The Challenge: CCF sought a solution that could deliver instantaneous, fact-based answers to participants’ questions when they need them most.

The Objective: They wanted to provide expectant mothers with a way to quickly get answers to their most pressing questions, even outside of regular office hours, while also allowing medical professionals to spend less time in their inboxes and more time in meaningful face-to-face interactions with patients.

The Solution: HCLTech, a longstanding CCF partner attuned to the foundation’s unique requirements and known for its flexibility and commitment to tailored solutions, was selected through a rigorous three-year procurement process to deliver this sensitive project. By leveraging Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Apps and Power Automate, all built on Dataverse, HCLTech designed a frictionless self-service interaction model for the study’s 400 pregnant participants over a four-year period.

The solution is structured around a three-tiered topic system to ensure comprehensive coverage and escalation to medical professionals as needed:

• Starting with basic clinic information
• Moving to patient-facing materials
• Ending with professional organization guidelines

The Impact: The benefits of HCLTech’s solution include:

• Copilot Studio: The generative AI solution is trained on relevant content from over a dozen PDFs and multiple websites curated by CCF.
• Power Automate: Should a participant’s question remained unanswered, the chatbot is designed to automatically initiate an email with the patient’s medical provider via Power Automate, guaranteeing a seamless escalation process.
• Power Apps: By leveraging Power Apps, the solution provides essential study metrics and analytics on interactions and response times. This data-driven approach enables CCF and the NIH to accurately gauge the project’s success, supporting an environment of continuous improvement and responsiveness to participant feedback.

Improving employee education with automation

Bank of Ireland, a leading financial institution with a rich heritage spanning more than two centuries, is known for its comprehensive range of banking and financial services catering to individuals, businesses and large corporations across Ireland and beyond.

The Challenge: The company found itself grappling with the inefficiencies of a fragmented HR landscape and a cumbersome load of manual processes, including:

• 5,000+ employee emails manually processed per month, 7% of which require follow-up
• 3,000 SAP records requiring manual processing each month
• 380 internal employee communication letters manually issued per month

This unwieldy system was compounded by more than 15 HR mailboxes and 40+ forms filled with unstructured data in Word and Excel.

The Objective: To help relieve worker frustration, reduce turnaround times and give time back to people managers and employees alike. One sure way to improve efficiency and clarity was to revamp Bank of Ireland’s employee education support process, where employees could seek straightforward solutions for funding applications, get clear communication about what courses are available and easily access their application statuses. This is key, as many workers need certifications to keep on top of regulatory demands, while others just want to boost their education.

The Solution: With the help of automation, HCLTech crafted a clear and simplified way to support all employees with their education needs. Leveraging the combination of Power Apps and Power Automate (Cloud Flows), we surrounded SAP with process automation and enhanced user experiences to build automated Cloud Flows, creating a one-stop-shop for employees, line managers and learning support team members to take better ownership of their education journeys.

The Impact: The implementation of HCLTech’s solution is improving the manager and employee experience — here’s how:

• When employees access the education portal for the first time, they’re automatically shown a clear application process and links to FAQs and suggested courses they’re qualified for
• If an application status changes, employees automatically receive an email with pertinent info
• When logging into the portal, employees see their latest number of applications, their statuses and how long they’re approved for
• When an employee starts a new application, user info is pre-populated with a prompt to correct if necessary

Tapping into Power Platform to automate large B2B orders

IKEA, the Swedish multinational conglomerate known for its ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, home accessories and other goods and home services, partnered with HCLTech to create a new Power Platform app, called STRUKTUR, that handles large B2B orders.

The Solution: This Microsoft-fueled application interface eases the end-to-end collaboration between front and back offices with automated flows that:

• Make it easier for B2B clients and internal users to submit orders or requests for large quantities of products
• Allow designated personnel within IKEA to review submitted requests, ensuring that they meet criteria for quality compliance
• Monitor the availability, status and updates related to the products involved in the order to make sure the products requested are available
• Automatically create official orders within IKEA’s system for approved requests
• Simplify the rejection management process — for example, by notifying the requester about an order rejection and providing alternatives

The app features:

• Robotic process automation integration to reduce manual work and speed up processes
• The ability to create, manage and search requests
• Five levels of role based authentication to ensure that users have access only to the parts of the app relevant to their role within the company
• Data visualization, including charts and grids
• Integration with Azure Cosmos for database needs
• Integration with Oracle Database for article validation needs
• Translations to 27 different languages
• Excel templates for import and export order requests
• Support from Rachael, a Teams chatbot built by HCLTech’s automation team to help requesters check order status

Benefits of STRUKTUR include:

• Less manual work
• Timely notifications
• Transparent information
• Increased efficiency for all functions (retail stores, supply chain partners, etc.)
• Stronger end-to-end framework for handling large B2B orders
• Increased reliability of information for B2B co-workers and customers
• Increased ability to access data and analytics to better understand the process and support continuous improvement