Solution Summary

Digital Realty (DLR) is the world’s largest wholesale datacenter providers with state-of-the-art Turn-Key facilities that can support any critical infrastructure. With 205 data centers spread across 11 countries and 4 continents, DLR provides flexible, reliable and cost-effective data center solutions with a suite of product offerings and unique leasing programs that are designed to meet the demands of customers of all sizes.

With a globally distributed team and various operations adapting a unified process template was harder, DLR in collaboration with Technovert embarked on a digital transformation journey in adapting a cloud-first strategy with a rollout of Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and Azure for employee collaboration and communication for gating process.

Challenge

DLR was seeking for a Unified communication & collaboration tool that would enable deeper collaboration among their core site operation teams, that would run their Gating process seamlessly. With the offices spanning numerous geographical territories, accurately scheduling, updating and tracking vital information across regional sites was time-consuming, and with so many moving parts, prone to human error. DLR engaged Technovert to provide an ideal solution on their Office365 platform.

Solution Strategy

Digital Realty business transformation team collaborated with our team of Office 365 experts to map their branch operations process for keeping tracking of daily progress, maintain SOP’s documents potential clients and follow notes across sites within their intranet. Technovert ‘s team found it ideal to utilize Microsoft PowerApps, Flow and Modern SharePoint sites for the solution. The accounting data for this solution was designed to leverage the Azure SQL server.

The application makes it possible to store vital information, tracking, and updating their geo-distributed sites information of daily status, Gating process, Site documentation and meeting notes using modern SharePoint List, libraries and Excel. using Azure SQL as the main data source but with connections to SharePoint Online and Microsoft PowerApps.  Through these connections site managers, update and track changes from SharePoint, take action and trigger workflows with Flow that update the App, making the process efficient, error-free and secure.

Technovert used Microsoft SharePoint and SharePoint modern pages to provide site owners and members of each site with unique self-service portal experiences a click to run site templates that enable mobility and increase engagement with staff across the globe. Microsoft Teams is used to provide managed collaboration tools and online workspaces to more than 120 locations. Users fill daily status, notes, or new project information and can input their data in a single location, where it will be available for action, or the next time they meet for group meetings.

When managing gating operations, the user information along with his site details was queried from Microsoft Graph, allowing the users’ key information to be pulled, viewed, and stored without the hassle of manual entries. These types of usability features improve the user experience, and the customer experience, and save valuable time and effort while increasing accuracy and recollection.  An additional Power BI dashboard for branch managers, group org teams gives the functionality and capabilities they need to effectively manage their org process.

Results

Employees of Digital Realty (DLR) can now easily file their branch’s day to day information, while branch managers now can review and approve. By managing all this information centrally within Office 365, and having common processes for tracking data, accuracy is improved, and the whole process is much easier and more efficient for all users within the organization. The Site Operations team became highly efficient in their core gating management process, along with the enabling of their on-field workforce.