Paves the way for value-added digital services with seamless, enterprise-wide collaboration

With a business social network supporting its operations across Southern Africa, AfriSam is building the agile, digital culture it needs to surge ahead with its customer services transformation.

“In the past, closing down issues identified during an audit could take months—but today, that’s all changed,” explains Montague. “Any items we identify in a meeting or an internal audit go into an audit community in HCL Connections as an activity. We allocate these activities to the relevant line managers, who typically upload the evidence required to resolve the items in a matter of hours. Thanks to the increased visibility that HCL Connections offers us, we’ve already closed down several audit items this year and we’ve been able to reduce the number of documents in circulation from 25,700 to 4,700.

She adds: “The HCL solution is also helping us to break down the barrier between enterprise risk management and the business. We recently created a self-auditing workflow using HCL LEAP, with Ukuvuma Solutions’ Agility Integration Portal and HCL Domino Designer XPages to automatically transform the reported audit items into HCL Connections activities. We have significantly reduced our workload per year—freeing our people to focus on value-added activities.”

With a single source of truth for procedures and policy documentation in HCL Connections, AfriSam is helping to ensure that all its business units are following best practices.

“In the past, the combination of limited communication between departments and paper-based processes meant that there was always a risk that different parts of the business were following different approaches to procedures such as recruitment,” comments Montague. “In the process of digitizing our documentation and migrating it to HCL Connections, we were able to consolidate our processes and procedures by 98 percent—helping us to maintain clear, consistent standards across AfriSam.” 

With an enterprise-class collaboration platform at the heart of its business, AfriSam is preparing to launch innovative value-added services to support its business growth.

“When we first embarked on our transformation process, we had a clear goal: that the technology should fade into the background,” says Montague. “Today, that’s exactly what’s happening. If one of our managers is standing in the control room of a manufacturing plant, they can respond to a message on their mobile device then and there. Our people increasingly start work with morning meetings in HCL Connections—it’s becoming the first place they visit to plan their days.”

She concludes: “Looking to the future, we see that becoming a digital business will be key to differentiate ourselves in a competitive market. Thanks to our new communications strategy and HCL Connections, we are building the foundational capabilities we need to support innovative services.”