Improving cross-company collaboration, with Teams, Power Apps, Power Automate and BPA Quality on SharePoint/Office 365.
Cross-company collaboration is complex, even in the digital world. Emails remain the traditional way to communicate with suppliers, customers and external stakeholders. However, emails are personal, not formatted and not very efficient. Using self-service portals with external stakeholders is a better alternative, however it’s more complex to setup, cost is higher and portals are not flexible to adapt.
Microsoft Teams with Office 365 brings new tools for improving communication with internal or external stakeholders. Teams is a tool for instant discussions, meetings, and file sharing. It’s now possible to post forms in Teams (using adaptive cards), which opens new doors for better cross-company collaboration.
This disruptive scenario presents a client organization improving collaboration with a major supplier using Teams. By receiving a supplier nonconformity, the client register the incident using a mobile device and the supplier gets an automatic Teams alert. A form is posted to the supplier to determine actions regarding the nonconformity. Finally, the supplier gets periodical performance indicators from the client.
In this example, Teams is used as an “unstructured” front-office collaboration tool while BPA Quality is the structured back-office software to track all data, decisions and actions. Teams is well adopted by growing number of organizations. New cool features are expected soon, like Talkie Walkie, task management, bringing Teams to shift workers and the shop floor.
At BPA, we think instant collaboration is the future of Quality. By replacing inefficient emails, heavy portals and traditional task workflows, instant collaboration improves communication with internal and external stakeholders. Benefits are numerous, sharing Teams with external users involves no additional cost for the client (Teams is part of Office 365) and it’s no charge for external stakeholders (they get invited by the client).
As a conclusion, BPA software and Office 365 provide new tools to reach Quality 4.0 and improve cross-company collaboration. This no-code scenario can easily be configured and implemented for any type of organization.
