MMG Talks Benefits to Streamlining Executive Approvals with OneList

Imagine for a moment you are a manager in transit to a remote worksite trying to action a range of workflow approval tasks. Searching for assigned tasks, navigating multiple inboxes, battling with a lack of connectivity and struggling to get the information you need to make these important decisions in a short space of time is challenging.

This is a situation that MMG managers were finding themselves in far too often. MMG is a global producer of mining copper, zinc and other base metals and in 2014 had a revenue of $2.48 billion. With headquarters in Melbourne, Australia but operations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, making critical and timely business decisions across multiple back-end business applications is an everyday struggle for busy managers.

It was for this very reason that MMG approached IQX Business Solutions (IQX) to help streamline their executive approvals with a focus on meeting the managers’ needs for easier and more efficient mobile approvals. There are plenty of takeaways and gold nuggets other businesses can draw from their experience.

Keeping their struggles in mind, IQX helped empower MMG managers to make fast, easy and informed business decisions by aggregating and mobilising all workflows from multiple sources into a single list – including SAP, SharePoint, K2, and OpenText.

What is OneList you ask? Simply put, OneList combines decision tasks across various business applications, with all the required supporting documents, in a user-friendly mobile app and web app. It is an aggregator of workflow tasks from various backend applications into an intuitive and consistent end-user experience for fast and effective task completion. Supported user-interfaces include native iOS, Android and Windows App for mobile and offline approvals, Web App, Outlook add-in and even a generic email client for desktop users.

Having been with MMG for over nine years and being lucky enough to work on some exciting and large scale projects during that time, who better to share the story with us than Georgia Cronin – MMG Manager Collaboration & Knowledge Management.

“The most common challenges we were trying to solve with OneList would be managers having to access several different systems to process approvals and overhead on their time. It was difficult to track, caused delays, and we were having to learn and be familiar with different workflow inboxes to process approvals,” Georgia said.

Georgia explained the key criteria used to evaluate the OneList solution were: ease of use, ease of implementation and ease of maintenance. By implementing OneList, managers were able to action high volume scenarios cumulatively representing eighty percent of all workflow volume, such as Requisitions, Service Entry Sheets, Leave Requests and Travel Expenses.

Through the implementation of new tech solutions, there is always a level of training and adaption time to be expected. Georgie explained that communication was the key to overcome any potential hurdles when moving to a new system or introducing tech into a very established and experienced organisation such as MMG.

“Like any tech project, there is a change in the way you do things, so the approach was to segment the user base and roll it out progressively. It was a pretty easy process – we launched using a one minute video, some briefing sessions and that was pretty much it,” Georgia said.

“It has been a very stable product over the years. I can’t remember a time we had an actual issue with the product.”

Georgia and the team at MMG had several learnings throughout the process which can transcend industries and apply in a number of business environments.

“The biggest thing here is that it was a big shift for an organisation that would usually look to its vendors to solve all of its problems. For MMG this was outside of our strategic landscape. My advice would be to remain open to look at tools that integrate well with your strategic vendors that can provide a simplified, lightweight, better user experience for your end-users.”

With this attitude, MMG is looking to the future with an understanding of the importance and opportunity presented by efficient tech solutions that can aggregate tasks and streamline processes.

“OneList remains the platform of choice for unifying our approvals, so as we develop new processes, the first port of call will be OneList. We also just kicked off IQX Fiori AppBuilder piloting with a few SAP functions to see how they go and are hoping to have the same success with this as we did with OneList,” Georgia said.