Situation

For over 75 years, this organisation has been a cornerstone of Australia’s construction industry, delivering high-quality materials and solutions across 300+ operation sites. With a workforce of approximately 8,000 employees and a legacy of excellence, this organisation prides itself on its integrated team culture. Yet, as the company grew, so did the complexity of managing policies and procedures across its sprawling operations. Thousands of critical documents—standard operating procedures (SOPs), policies, and templates—remained trapped in outdated formats in on-premises file shares, creating a bottleneck that threatened compliance, efficiency, and collaboration.

The construction company wanted a solution that would enable them to:  

1. Centralise all documents in a secure, user-friendly repository.
2. Systematise the policy and procedure management process to meet the construction industry’s evolving compliance and governance requirements.
3. Generate accurate and compliant reports for external stakeholders such as industry regulators, ASX, shareholders, insurers, and local, state, and federal government

A quick Google search led them to contact the construction industry’s SharePoint specialist Professional Advantage.

Solution

Professional Advantage (PA) worked closely with the client project stakeholders to:

1. Migrate their on-premises file shares to SharePoint in Microsoft 365.
2. Implement a Document Management System (DMS) in SharePoint to centralise their content repository.
3. Develop complex scripts in Power Apps to automate transferring old documents and templates from the old version to the new one.
4. Implement a SharePoint-based Policy Hub to standardise the policy and procedure management process.

Impact

PA’s innovative approach and solution to the project enabled the client to benefit from:

1. Costs avoided amounted to approximately AUD $250,000. Professional Advantage developed automation routines that cut the document migration time from six months to just three weeks. This eliminated the need to hire up to three temporary staff and avoided an estimated AUD $250,000 in costs, despite the complexity of thousands of documents and inconsistent templates.
2. Standardised processes. Streamlined and standardised the policy and procedure process across their 360 sites with a central place for policy creation, review, approval, and renewal/expiration.
3. Audit readiness. Becoming always audit-ready with the Policy Hub’s easy-to-use, accurate, and compliant reporting, built-in audit trail, and version history.
4. Enhanced security. Strengthened policy and procedure document security and confidentiality with SharePoint’s robust data security, access management, and retention policy features.
5. Improved collaboration. Facilitated better collaboration and feedback loop between policy authors and approvers, whether in the office or on the field.