Epiq, a global technology-enabled services leader, used Power Platform to streamline its HR operations. The solution includes end-to-end process automation, AI-driven forms processing, dashboards, and bots for monitoring and managing requests. A Center of Excellence helps build and maintain a pipeline of over 600 other apps across the company.
“By automating our onboarding and offboarding process with Power Platform, we’re saving about 2,000 hours of work each month and over US$500,000 annually in associated costs. And we’ve taken the time needed for onboarding down from weeks to days.”
Colt Coan, Senior Manager of Rapid Development, Epiq
Epiq is a global technology-enabled services leader to law firms, corporations, financial institutions, and government agencies. With more than 8,000 people and operations worldwide, Epiq offers solutions for large-scale and complex client matters such as class-action suits, mass torts, bankruptcies, eDiscovery, and more. The company has a long track record of successfully managing highly visible litigation, regulatory, and compliance projects.
Epiq’s services require it to rapidly scale up teams by hiring dozens or even hundreds of highly skilled workers for major client engagements. Once projects are completed, these resources need to be efficiently off boarded. But Epiq struggled to achieve these tasks, due to decentralized, inconsistent, and manual processes for onboarding and offboarding across different business units. This created limited visibility into status, high operational costs, and poor collaboration between hiring managers and IT teams.
"The current state was decentralized, with separate manual processes used by different departments and business units,” says Colt Coan, Senior Manager of Rapid Development at Epiq. “We had no visibility to the status of these processes without engaging IT or another stakeholder."
Some of the problems posed by this included:
- The onboarding process was spread across different business units and locations, with no standardization or central governance.
- There was heavy reliance on tribal knowledge and manual processes. For example, IT staff had to manually create AD accounts, provision mailboxes, assign licenses, etc.
- There was no automated way to disable accounts when employees left the company. Accounts were not always properly decommissioned.
- Equipment requests for new hires were handled through spreadsheets, with inconsistent formats and tracking.
- There was limited visibility into their endpoint assets and refresh cycles.
Troubleshooting these issues burned up valuable time for both managers and IT staff. Costs were high from paying new hires to wait around to become productive. Productivity was also a challenge for IT teams due to the large number of manual tasks required during offboarding. And with no standard processes, issues were addressed inconsistently across business units.
Power Apps and Power Automate create a better experience for employees and managers
Epiq needed a solution that would provide end-to-end automation for onboarding and offboarding, real-time status visibility, equipment tracking, and seamless integration across HR, IT, and other systems. This would establish a true partnership between business teams and IT, boosting collaboration and driving efficiency. “We have to build teams in a hurry,” says Coan. “That’s hard to do with a very small IT team.”
Epiq used Power Platform to help it solve its HR problems and give the company the right tools for meeting rapidly changing business needs. Its wide array of tools made it the flexible and powerful HR assistant the company needed.
The solution–which the company calls Launchpad—leverages Dataverse as the data layer allowed reusable components that simplified development and maintenance. Power Apps provides the user interfaces and orchestration logic, with more than a dozen apps supporting different roles and processes. Power Automate manages the complex workflows and integration points with HR, IT, and other systems. Pre-built connectors integrate the system with the company’s Workday and ServiceNow systems.
Power BI embeds real-time analytics into the solution, providing managers with live visibility into new hire status. A chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents enables IT staff to track and manage a hiring request as it moves through the pipeline. An app provides a consolidated view of all activities.
Power Automate also creates a better experience for managers and employees. “When we’re onboarding new people, managers will receive a notification in Teams that let them request hardware for their new hires,” says Coan. “They’ll see pictures of laptop options and they can click on the one they want, along with monitor options. They’ll be asked about phone needs. It used to be we had to chase down every manager for every new hire. Now, it’s all done automatically, with links sent to managers to get onboarding rolling.”
User provisioning and access management is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365. Equipment fulfillment connects with shipping systems for tracking. Password reset and mailbox provisioning is automated during onboarding.
There’s also an AI component which helped solve an issue when hiring multiple employees. To complete a hiring form, managers often copy and paste employee IDs from various, third-party applications. The result was inconsistent formatting that required manual corrections and slowed down processing. AI Builder in Power Automate along with Azure OpenAI was used to add a pre-built model that automated this process. “With AI Builder in Power Automate, we added a model that cleans up formatting of new employee submission forms. This allows us to process more efficiently at scale--and it works flawlessly,” says Coan.
Substantial savings in time and money
Launchpad has delivered game-changing benefits for Epiq. Says Coan: “By automating our onboarding and offboarding process with Power Platform, we’re saving about 2,000 hours of work each month and over US$500,000 annually in associated costs. And we’ve taken the time needed for onboarding down from weeks to days.”
The extensive time and cost savings allow managers and IT staff to focus on more value-added tasks. New hires get up and running, faster. The unified data model and embedded analytics provide a panoramic view of the business and lead to informed decision making.
Since deploying their Launchpad solution, Epiq has continued to identify new automation and analytics opportunities across the organization. In one example, Epiq uses Power Platform to automatically inventory laptops used company wide. This information includes the year a particular machine was purchased, making it much easier to budget for laptop refresh cycles.
Faster, more rigorous development
COVID sparked the idea to move to Power Platform. As Coan explains, “It all started during COVID. Many of our internal applications were inaccessible with our workforce going remote. As we were looking into moving to Azure for single sign-on for our enterprise applications, that's when I discovered Power Automate. Suddenly, I'm up until 4 a.m. working with Power Automate and thinking, this is the coolest thing I've ever done. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to automate business processes.”
Coan and a team member quickly started work on the hiring solution, with new features added over the next two years. Recently, Coan decided it was time to overhaul the solution and centralize everything on to Dataverse for greater efficiency. The whole process took him just a few weeks.
For this latest iteration, Coan was also using pipelines in Power Platform, which Epiq recently introduced to make it easier for users to apply ALM rigor to their Power Platform solutions. This, together with managed environments, has set the stage for more mission critical app development across the company – with citizen developers working closely with more advanced developers. “We empower citizen developers to come up with the vision, while my team develops the architecture and provides governance,” says Coan.
Along with more than 300 unmanaged solutions, Epiq now counts another 300 managed solutions that are either in use or under development. An active Center of Excellence helps build and maintain this increasingly active pipeline. As Coan says, “Since working with Power Platform, there has never been this much collaboration between the business and IT teams. Everyone is planning and building compelling business solutions together.”
With low-code development capabilities now available companywide, Epiq is positioned to continually innovate and digitally transform all aspects of their business.
“The current state was decentralized, with separate manual processes used by different departments and business units. We had no visibility to the status of these processes without engaging IT or another stakeholder.”
Colt Coan, Senior Manager of Rapid Development, Epiq
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