Transformation at Transurban with Microsoft 365 content management solution

Transurban is one of the world’s largest toll-road operators. With a portfolio of urban toll road networks across Australia, Canada, and the United States, Transurban’s purpose is to make sure every journey is a safe one.

The challenge

Transurban’s existing QMS was built on SharePoint Online and included a series of Power Automate workflows which went some way towards supporting the document management process, however the Transurban team identified several challenges, including:

• no ability to obtain a consolidated view of all workflows running on documents
• no ability to effectively cancel an in-progress workflow
• cancelled workflows would leave remnants of approval tasks that would confuse staff
• frequent double handling and manual intervention to overcome problems

In addition, there were also challenges with the publishing and sharing of documents to external partners, suppliers, and stakeholders. Historically, documents had to be converted to PDF, and published to a library where sharing links could be provided to external parties. This process didn’t provide external stakeholders with a central place to access relevant documentation, meaning information was easily lost.

It was critical that the solution addressed three key areas:

• Policy and process: the new system needed to have right information governance in place that caters to different regions and multiple assets.
• Use of systems: the new system must help to standardise ways of working and systems used to manage controlled documents across the business.
• Automation: the new system removes the need for time-consuming manual processes that were reliant on individuals.

Our approach

Over a period of 12 months, Engage Squared worked closely with Transurban to unpack their needs and define a new experience that put employees needs at the heart of the solution. The Engage Squared project team worked with Transurban’s team of Document Controllers across Australia and the United States to understand the current process, identify gaps, pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Using an Agile approach, we split our work across four sprints. Through our discovery phase, our team designed a solution architecture that fully leveraged the low code capability of the Power Platform – helping Transurban increase the value in their existing Microsoft 365 investment. While the solution is low code, it is not low complexity. The solution design includes complex integrations and configuration to ensure it removes current pain points, and more importantly, is scalable for future iterations.

Given the complexity of the quality management process, we worked with the Transurban team to release the new system in two stages. The first stage included an MVP release in July 2022. This allowed the Engage Squared team to undertake further consultation with employees and identify new requirements. Stage two included updating the solution based on feedback captured during the MVP release and officially launching the new experience in November 2022. This two-stage process allowed us to address and launch baseline requirements through the MVP and extend upon those requirements in the official release.

The solution

A dashboard-style user interface was designed using a combination of the Power Platform and SharePoint Online. This approach allowed us to provide a single point of reference for employees responsible for managing each step of the document lifecycle. The solution allows for one or more documents to be selected and a review cycle initiated. Multiple users can be assigned to review a document; this includes the original document owner/s who are automatically included in the review cycle.

Once a document has passed through the review stage, the approval and publish stage is then initiated. The new solution also allows users to stop or cancel the workflow at any stage during the process – which was a big win from the previous experience, which caused unnecessary errors and general confusion.

Once a document is approved for publishing, relevant documents can be easily converted into PDF’s and published to a central location where they’re made available for use. By design, metadata on both the source and target documents is automatically maintained to ensure easy reference between source files and published documents.

The final step in the solution includes the ability to initiate and record an ‘acknowledgement’ from end users. This allows the Transurban team to ensure the right people have read and understood changes operations or safety information that has been documented and shared through a formal acknowledgement process. A record of acknowledgements is then kept in the solution, for future reference.

The result

After completing the discovery, design, and development phases with Engage Squared, Transurban now has a modern platform that they can continue to build on with a second release being planned for mid-2023.

The new Asset Management and Operations content management solution now allows Transurban to:

• Provide Document Controller, and other actors in the management of controlled document lifecycles to easily find work initiated by, or assigned to them
• Compose new documents based on re-usable components
• Manage their draft controlled documents masters
• Offload onerous quality assurance tasks for Document Controller to automation
• Monitor and control both review & approval tasks at both the process and individual level
• Publish new (versions) of controlled documents in different file formats
• Retire previously published controlled documents
• Initiate and manage the distribution of controlled document copies to locations accessible by partners, vendors, contractors, or other external parties
• Leave an audit trail for any quality assurance tasks conducted, or the movement or generation of documents
• Rely on powerful search capabilities for the discovery of managed and controlled content in one or more locations
• Notify select user groups of the (re)publishing of controlled documents
• Assign and track the acknowledgement of new controlled document (versions), or a lack thereof

The stats:

• 17,285 homepage views by 768 users
• 3,000 draft documents are currently stored in the asset content portal
• 359 documents have been shared via the external asset content portal
• An increase in the number of documents now able to save into PDFs that were previously too large
• A reduction in the time spent to create a document