Think Technology Australia deliver massive ROI to a Toyota dealership through SharePoint-powered, automated document management

When a Thomas Bros Toyota service centre approached Think Technology Australia, the company’s dealership team was battling through manual processes that were dependent on on-premises infrastructure. Over 100 documents were being scanned each day and then manually moved into folders on a local fileshare. This required one full-time staff member.

“We’re a busy dealership, servicing  150+ clients each day. We need to maintain customer records to support customers when they are making warranty claims and to answer questions about their history with us,” says Brad – CFO of Thomas Bros. The volume of documents has been growing, and we needed a better way to capture and store those documents, as well as search when we had a customer inquiry.”

Think Technology Australia’s Mungo Bright – COO, worked with their team to identify a solution that would reduce the amount of manual document management while delivering a rapid return on any new investment.

“Thomas Bros was already a Microsoft 365 customer, so it made sense to leverage that investment. Our team wasn’t using all the features of its subscription, so we built the foundation of the solution on SharePoint.”

The new solution uses a number of Microsoft technologies that have been integrated by Think Technology Australia’s team. Those include Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure Logic Apps. The performance of the new solution is monitored through a dashboard built with Power BI that gives the Toyota service centre clear visibility of the number of documents being processed and how much time is being saved over the old process.

When documents are scanned with a high-speed automatic scanner into the new system, data from within each document is collected and tagged creating metadata. As a result, it has become far easier and faster to locate documents. Staff no longer have to search through lists of documents in folders.

Erin, Human Resources Manager for Thomas Bros says, “The amount of time we are saving just on document retrieval is is amazing. Our service and delivery teams are able to respond to customer requests and inquiries faster than ever before. In an increasingly competitive market, this is critically important.”

The new system has transformed operations significantly. The Power BI dashboard shows that Thomas Bros team has transformed a process that required a full-time team member to be scanning and saving documents all day now takes just seven minutes. Not only is the process faster by an order of magnitude but it now has fewer errors with the AI integrated into the system able to flag mistakes so they can be quickly rectified.

“There’s a lot of hype around AI but this application highlights how it can be used to help a business improve service delivery to everyone. Fewer errors benefits customers as their questions are answered faster and with greater accuracy,” says Mungo Bright.

Think Technology Australia recommended a Microsoft-based solution for several reasons. Microsoft 365 is a proven platform that has established itself as a market leading business platform. The user interface is familiar to staff which meant training in the new system was relatively easy. And with Toyota already being a Microsoft 365 customer, it was able to extract further value from its subscription.

A further cost reduction was achieved by reducing the requirement for a on-premises server.

Although the new system gave the service centre a massive productivity boost, it did not require a substantial budget or long implementation time. By taking advantage of the company’s exisiting Microsoft 365 licensing, software costs were minimised. The entire implementation process took just two weeks.

“The return on investment for us has been phenomenal,” says the Toyota Service Centre. We were already licensed for many of the pieces of the puzzle and the two-week implementation meant the time to value was almost instant. This has been a game changer for us. Our team is better able to serve customers and the employee who was previously spending their day scanning and filing documents can now be engaged in far more interesting and valuable work. We could be happier with the outcome.”

To learn more contact Think Technology Australia