K2- and SharePoint-based solutions have provided Australian Amalgamated Terminals (AAT)  a major facility provider the stevedoring industry in Australia, a way to improve the speed, accuracy and visibility of several key business processes, including incident management, claims management and management of its asset register.

Each of these functions was administered through manual, paper-based processes that were labour intensive, lacked reporting capabilities and had high management overhead.

K2- and SharePoint-based solutions, built and implemented by K2 Partner jEyLaBs, streamlined these key processes for AAT and led to time savings, increased visibility, improved accuracy of data and greater decision making capabilities.

AAT needed to be able to record, manage and report on a large number of varying incidents at its ports and facilities. The company also needed a repository to register claims, both for and against the company. The processes used for these purposes were paper based and offered no reporting capabilities.

AAT operates and manages a large fleet of assets, including cranes, forklifts, motor vehicles, buildings and accessories. The systems used to record these assets did not provide accurate depreciation information and failed to provide a meaningful way for this information to be queried.
With a staff of up to 100, three busy ports and dealings with a large number of third-party contractors, AAT’s manual processes weren’t providing the speed, consistency, reliability and visibility the company desperately wanted. The existing systems required high administrative overhead and left the door open for costly mistakes.

AAT implemented Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration portal, but according to Vincent Macheda, National IT and Communications Manager for AAT, SharePoint was too limited in its ability to cope with multi-layered workflow requirements across multiple roles.

“SharePoint was a great tool for centralizing many of our business functions,” Macheda said, “but we had a need to automate specific business rules, and this could not be accomplished with SharePoint alone.”

SharePoint workflow experts and IT consulting firm jEyLaBs was commissioned to streamline AAT’s processes. Leveraging experience with the cloud and social services, mobile solutions, and gamification techniques for modernizing applications, jEyLaBs provided efficient solutions for AAT’s process problems.

The jEyLaBs team implemented K2-based solutions for incident management, claims management and asset register management. The solutions were highly configurable, included AAT’s specific business rules and requirements, and catered to interface requirements by leveraging the Microsoft SharePoint platform.

The solution architecture includes InfoPath forms to capture data and utilizes the K2 engine to guide the process along the workflow path — routing documents to the right people at the right time, sending alerts and notifications, and considering data against built-in business logic.

Visibility features, such as K2 View Flow, SharePoint List views and SQL-based reports allow AAT managers to see exactly what’s happening at any point in the process and identify roadblocks.

The K2-based solutions improve efficiency and accuracy of data capture significantly, Macheda said.

“We’re now in a position where our core business rules, such as document approvals, are automated and sent to the appropriate party for review,” he said. “This improves the efficiency of all the related processes and provides visibility across the entire organisation.”

Jey Srikantha, Principal at jEyLaBs, said his team of consultants have been working closely with AAT to provide training and support to the ongoing evolution of these applications.

Enhancements have been made to these applications by AAT and jEyLaBs to further customise the systems. AAT is currently implementing additional jEyLaBs-built K2 solutions.