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May 05, 2021

Syngenta Group legal team creates companywide impact using Microsoft Power Platform

The people who work at agricultural and technology innovator Syngenta Group prize the company’s “can-do” culture, which makes it easy to make great ideas happen. But the information and business process professionals at Syngenta Group met with a range of blockers when helping the legal team tackle productivity-dampening issues. They found that they could solve a host of routine business challenges by creating simple solutions with Microsoft Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and the rest of Microsoft Power Platform, putting fast improvements within reach of their colleagues without needing advanced coding skills.

Syngenta Group

“When I began researching Microsoft Power Platform, I realized that it offers a wealth of possibilities, including more than 300 different connectors, giving us an endless pool of opportunities to explore.”

Fady Khair, Process and Technology Manager for Legal Operations, Syngenta Group

Syngenta Group innovates to help farmers succeed in one of the world’s toughest professions. In a domain fraught with uncertainty, Syngenta Group solutions help even the odds with digital technologies like satellite imaging to inform farmers about crop status. The company supplies cutting-edge updates on traditional sustainable farming practices, like rain-catchment systems and solar-powered grain storage containers. Now that creativity extends to a team of Syngenta Group IT and business professionals. Their discovery of the Microsoft Power Platform low-code tool set opened a gateway to fast solutions that save the company time and money—while helping the team deliver superior results.

Opening an endless pool of opportunity

Making sure that Syngenta Group workers have the career development options that they want inspired Marie-Cecile Martin, Head of Legal Academy at Syngenta Group, to ponder the best way to connect them with available opportunities. “We like to develop our people as much as possible,” she says. “In a 2019 survey, they let us know that they prefer to learn by doing, rather than by passively reading an e-learning program.”

Marie-Cecile also knew that the leadership team in the legal department was stymied by a growing number of projects and a dearth of resources. She approached colleague Fady Khair, Process and Technology Manager for Legal Operations at Syngenta Group. They agreed that Microsoft Power Platform offered the capabilities needed for them to close the gap between legal department leadership and Syngenta Group employees who were eager to gain experience in particular areas. Although Fady had never worked as a developer, he used online resources to quickly pick up the skills he needed to create Project Pool, the solution that the team envisioned. “When I began researching Microsoft Power Platform, I realized that it offers a wealth of possibilities, including more than 300 different connectors, giving us an endless pool of opportunities to explore,” says Fady.

Marie-Cecile was delighted. “It’s the perfect tool. And now more than ever, with our new remote way of working due to COVID-19, we need tools that help our people learn and grow because jobs are evolving faster as we seek ways to make quicker decisions and adapt to new situations.”

The capability that the team has gained with Microsoft Power Platform aligns perfectly with the vision of Richard Hyams, Head of Legal Operations Technology and Process at Syngenta Group. “Since taking over the leadership of the Legal Operations technology team, I’ve emphasized empowering the team members to undertake in-house development to better support the legal team,” he says.

Marie-Cecile felt that Project Pool could help managers deepen trust with employees. “The increased transparency we’ve gotten from Project Pool gives us the chance to spark better conversations between employees and their line managers about their development,” she says. “And one of the real advantages of Microsoft Power Platform is the fast change management it promotes. We’re able to get the lawyers in our department onboard because we can create significant advantages for them quickly.”

Taking process improvements to the next level with Microsoft Power Platform

Fady appreciates how using a low-code tool set like Microsoft Power Platform closes the traditional gap between highly technical developers and the process experts. It means that the employees who will use applications developed with Microsoft Power Platform aren’t just advisors—they’re participants.

Marcus Holt, Legal Operations Trainee at Syngenta Group, is a perfect example. Educated as a legal professional, he came to the department without coding experience but quickly gained skills in Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents as he helped automate legal processes for his fellow legal professionals. Syngenta Group had a rich trove of information—historical documents, emails, and other materials—but the legal team was frequently stymied in its quest for the relevant record, which might be in a SharePoint folder or Microsoft OneDrive or on the email server.

Marcus had the subject matter insight needed to help fix the situation. His light exposure to information technology was irrelevant. “Even without a technical background and just six months into my career at Syngenta Group, I helped to create a chatbot that legal team members now use to locate documents, FAQs, training materials, and videos,” he explains. “Basically, we’ve created a one-stop shop for various legal department needs, including a portal that we use to quickly find relevant documents. People don’t need to know which SharePoint site has the document they need, or even what SharePoint is, for that matter. The bot directs them to the correct document at once, and it’s available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” And the comprehensive analytics in Power Virtual Agents shows key performance indicators for bots, paving the way for ongoing process improvement.

Shrinking development time to create a “best-fit” solution

When Fady’s team added Power Automate to its toolkit, team members’ ability to solve business issues leapt ahead. They expanded on the bot portal to create a service support ticketing system, easily adding automation to better manage their own support requests. The embedded bot takes care of everything, analyzing the user’s need, creating a support ticket, and sending it—all without the employee ever having to leave the bot. “People can just jump in and ask for what they need when they need it,” says Fady. “We used Power Automate to sidestep the months it would otherwise have taken to build a solution, meeting our internal clients’ needs in just a couple of days.”

Marcus and Richard appreciate the level of care involved with innovating for the famously risk-averse legal profession. “Our lawyers accepted the bot very well,” says Richard. “Now we’re making great progress in automating a lot of legal operations and paralegal processes.”

Adds Marcus, “I’ve been surprised at how fast we can create apps and tools. The advantage of Microsoft Power Platform is that you don’t have to be a technical genius to quickly learn to use it and build useful tools.”

Establishing a model for the future

When Syngenta Group limited employee business travel due to COVID-19 precautions, Fady’s team created a tool that automates key security risk area audits for the company’s sites around the world. Each site has a different security risk level and a particular set of controls that must be measured and monitored. The site manager uses a menu in the tool to select the relevant security risk factors for their site, which creates the audit plan. Images of the site can be uploaded with the plan. The team used Power Automate and Power Apps to automate the flow of information from Microsoft Azure SQL Database, creating alerts that prompt site managers to complete various actions within the necessary timeframes. Fady’s team further extends the value of the tool by incorporating Power BI dashboards and reports that give the executive team clear visibility into the security risk profile for a particular region or country. This capability will drastically reduce the need for travel in the future and delivers sharply increased efficiency today.

“Our Microsoft Power Platform–based security audit solution completely eliminates information getting passed among various people, lost, or otherwise disrupted,” says Richard. “It’s brought us ease of use and reduces the need for travel—yet we created it very quickly.”

The close partnership between IT and business professionals doesn’t just add efficiency. It creates the most relevant, functional tools possible because the teams can address specific needs quickly. “Two or three days after coming to our internal Power Apps team with an idea, we have a working prototype,” says Marie-Cecile. “This approach unleashes a creativity that is simply amazing for business.”

Richard finds that the agility and bespoke functionality that Syngenta Group gains by using Microsoft Power Platform removes the appeal of expensive third-party solutions. “The in-house systems that we build perfectly fit our needs, and we’d have to customize ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions anyway, adding to an already expensive option,” he says. “Most importantly, we now have a much more well-rounded and agile team, which helps us move forward very quickly.”

For Fady, adopting the technologies spurred much-needed change. “Our legal teams around the world realize that agility is pivotal to their survival. We’re using Microsoft Power Platform to accelerate that transformation.”

Find out more about Syngenta Group on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“Two or three days after coming to our internal Power Apps team with an idea, we have a working prototype. This approach unleashes a creativity that is simply amazing for business.”

Marie-Cecile Martin, Head of Legal Academy, Syngenta Group

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