EY streamlines customer onboarding processes, improves customer service with Power Platform

Building trust, building solutions 

A good business relationship is one with trust. EY understands that earning and preserving that trust is a vital part of fulfilling its purpose of building a better working world. As one of the largest global professional services organizations providing consulting, assurance, tax and transaction services, EY helps address its clients’ toughest challenges. The Digital & Emerging Technologies team at EY supports clients with a full range of digital, hyper-automation, and emerging technologies solutions, including low-code/no-code solutions that help clients access and analyze large amounts of data generated by their businesses every day. 

A client in the manufacturing industry engaged EY to help streamline its customer onboarding process and make better use of its customer data. The client organization relied on manual processes and email to share and coordinate data between multiple teams and systems. The lack of centralization made customer information hard to find, leading to difficulty assessing record status, duplication of work and data, and inconsistencies between data silos. Customer service team members spent valuable time tracking down and verifying records instead of delivering higher value to their customers. 

Streamlining development with low-code

With low-code development in mind, EY chose Microsoft Power Platform as the foundation for a more streamlined onboarding system designed to reduce cross-team dependencies, automate repetitive tasks, and ensure simple, secure storage of customer information. 

“We looked at a few products, and Microsoft was able to address our problems,” says Umang Gulati, Manager of Digital and Emerging Technologies at EY. “Integrations with other applications, ease of use, standing up an environment, and so forth... all of that was a given with Power Platform.”

Power Platform also helped reduce dependence on traditional coding. The objective was to set up the client to be able to easily augment and expand the solution in the future as required. “We're seeing a shift in our consulting practice to low-code technologies,” says Gulati. 

“Using traditional coding techniques, creating an app with 10 different integrations would in itself be a challenge. On top of that, we would have to create different environments for development, testing, and production, and make sure the code consistency is kept to the highest standards. Power Platform gives us all these benefits out-of-the-box,” Gulati adds.

To build out the solution, EY used Microsoft Power Apps to connect to the client’s CRM tool and gathered the necessary data to drive cross-department workflows before sending the data to the client’s ERP (SAP S/4HANA) system. The team took advantage of the out-of-the-box data connectors between Power Platform and Windows Active Directory to ensure that access is based on Microsoft Office 365 user groups, and developed UI and UX based on the client’s design standards. All transactions and value dates are stored in Azure SQL Database, while Azure Blob Storage holds documents and attachments, thus reducing duplication and ensuring greater accuracy in records. Once all necessary information is collected from required teams—a process that now takes much less employee time—the app uses API calls to create a customer in SAP S/4HANA.

For solution implementation, EY created an efficient and consistent way to collect siloed data and information from disparate teams—ensuring that departments wouldn’t be bogged down with irrelevant fields they couldn’t fill in. The team worked with the developers to enhance the CRM to automate the data exchange through API calls, enabling data to move through the newly designed process.

Working better

The end result is an app that securely and accurately collects, reviews, and propagates customer data for the creation of customer records in the downstream SAP S/4HANA system. With more consistent records and centralized tracking of approval processes, the client transformed its onboarding workflow, minimizing the amount of manual input needed to add new customers and prioritizing end-user accessibility. By using Power Platform, EY saved a lot of development time and created an automated company-wide solution for its client without building any new databases. 

EY deployed this solution for its client in January 2022. For the first 30 days, Gulati's team provided the customer with support that included a period of hands-on assistance, collaboration, and training in which EY prepares the client to take over the running and management of the solution. With no-code/low-code solutions, the client gains the autonomy to maintain, troubleshoot, and further enhance Power Apps created by EY. 

“Now their own folks can look at other challenges and implement solutions themselves,” says Gulati. “We are obviously here to guide them and help them with any issues, but they're the ones who are basically spearheading these projects internally and implementing and developing these solutions." The Power Platform solution has been well received across the company, helping the organization deliver higher levels of customer service and building trust with its customer base. The client is now also equipped to easily build and innovate with the solution moving forward.

Because new customer onboarding is a common challenge facing many organizations, EY is taking what it has learned from this implementation and using the high-level principles to proactively create innovations for other clients. Says Gulati, “With Power Platform we can just focus on the business problem, solve it, deploy it, and move on to the next challenge.”

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