Customer Story – Template
From Request to Approval: Building the relationship between employees and managers
Customer Reference | 2024
Arch partnered with Sunderland City Council, to create a integrated message app in Teams delivering on both relationship enhancement and efficiency benefit during times of funding and resource challenge
Introduction
Overview of the company and background to project.
With over x number of employees at Sunderland CC, all employees engage with HR Fiori apps to meet their daily employee type transactions.
The spin off from the pandemic and employees working in hybrid working patterns has driven the essential role HR applications play in managing day to day requests for leave, time payment and xx — and the opportunity managers have to respond more quickly to employee requests and so better deliver on their employee relationships, while releasing time to focus on other critical business functions.
When leaders at Sunderland cc were approached to co-innovate with Arch to make a digital transformation, they quickly onboarded with the opportunity to partner and lead with technology, ensuring their transformation would endure.
Opportunity
Sunderland’s mangers and employees were using Fiori to and Outlook to process request for Leave, Expenses and Holiday pay.
Notifications of employee requests for management authorization was delivered to Outlook from where the manager would navigate to the Fiori app to approve or reject the request.
This proved very time inefficient and often meant employees waited considerable time before managers actioned requests, as the navigation was time consuming.
“We knew there was a better, faster and more efficient way to respond to these requests, without disprupting the flow of daily processes. All our manager have Teams open and are actively engaged with Teams, where they are holding meetings, saving information and managing their daily planning.
It was a no-brainer to implement Looply, using Teams to deliver employee requests to be actioned immediately by managers and keeping employees informed of decisions”
After the initial build app development, Sunderland CC knew it had to scale up its IT capability and build its own tech talent to sustain and scale the platform.
- Objective 1
- Objective 2
- Objective 3
- Objective 4
Solution
Building the Looply App
The Arch innovation team partnered with Sunderland CC to build a new digital app where managers can be notified in real-time in Teams of any employee requests. Within the Looply notification, they can immediately approve or reject the request. Cards delivering the employee request, were designed to contain all the information needed to make decisions . Similarly, the employee is notified immediately in the Looply Teams app, of the action taken by a manager. The app offers streamlined notification and notification management – all information in a single app
“Arch provided guidance on the skills required by our Team to extend the use of Looply within the council. By training and delivering and delivering thorough learning Looply”
Over the project, Arch helped Sunderland to embed upskilling and updating compensation and benefits for the company. As HR manager, xxx explains “Helping our customers to not only improve their processes, but also to simultanelusly upskill their own in-house resources is essential to developing a solid working partnership. The technology was never the bottleneck— the demands on our teams time was the challenge”
“As an innovation team member, designing apps and helping our customers to create efficiencies is integral to their ability to manage their work load.”
– David Freeman
Sunderland solutions Manager
Impact
Making time for manager and employees
Over the past 4 months, Sunderland has had …. changes in its environment. Managers were asked to share the impact it has had on their working day.
They results showed an excitement for working in a streamlined environment, commenting on how quick and easy decision making has become, by having all the information required in front of you.
2000+
leave requests processed on the first day
Stat 2
time to respond to first delivered notification
4.7
App rating from council employees