İş GYO, which reshaped its corporate business processes in partnership with GGSoft, will keep taking new and efficient steps.

A solid foundation for business processes, a strong building

Setting out with the goals of standardization and efficiency, İş GYO eliminated risks such as lost documents and invoice tracking issues from the very first steps of its investment, using GGSoft’s PaperWork software infrastructure. With this solution, risks such as errors and omissions in processes like project budgeting are reduced to zero. To build a strong foundation for corporate memory, İş GYO prioritized moving from paper documentation to digital archiving.

The solution also brings risk factors such as possible errors and omissions in project budgeting processes down to zero. Because İş GYO’s priority was to move from paper documentation to digital archiving to build a strong foundation for corporate memory, and because workflows would continue during this process, clear workflows had to be defined. Pointing out that a process starting with documents has now reached workflows, İş GYO IT Director Tolga YILMAZ added that this development is “the natural result of an integrated structure.” Tolga YILMAZ explained this in terms of the company’s corporate work and responsibilities: “Documents are the foundation of all our business processes and responsibilities. We have many different processes, from data security to approval mechanisms and e-signatures, and we are accountable to many stakeholders, including public authorities such as BDDK (Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency) and SPK (Capital Markets Board of Türkiye). That is why an end-to-end traceable, monitorable, manageable and flexible structure matters. We chose GGSoft based on its positive references and successful projects.”

A live, ongoing project

In light of these priorities, İş GYO made the investment decision at the end of 2013 for a live, ongoing project, and the investment, divided into specific phases, began to be rolled out within the company. The first priority was “archiving documents that need to pass through workflows,” followed by workflow work on one side and reporting-focused steps on the other. The roadmap prepared with this prioritization made things easier for all project parties. Tolga YILMAZ summarized the importance of this route and the progress of the investment: “By its dynamics, real estate is a very different sector, and that makes its business processes different too. For a single project, we work with many different stakeholders, from municipalities to construction companies, each with its own specific processes. We work with GGSoft to stay in seamless, fast communication with all these stakeholders. Construction is a very different sector, so we have very different processes. After all, we do not manufacture goods, but we have many stakeholders, from municipalities to construction companies, each with its own processes. We took the investment step with GGSoft to maintain seamless and complete connections with all of them. This is a very live project and it is still ongoing. Each step of the investment helps us see new needs or take different steps from the decision we made at the start. GGSoft keeps fully in step with this evolution in our thinking through rapid innovation.”

The entire project will be positioned end to end on this structure

The comprehensive process management work, built on archiving and on which the entire project will be positioned end to end, was an important step toward standardization across the organization. In other words, corporate memory was created first, and then the scope of the investment grew with evolving needs. This progress is also welcomed on the “user” side of the investment, by İş GYO employees. Noting that more workflows will follow, Tolga YILMAZ described the topics they are working on with GGSoft: “We are developing workflows such as Invoice Approval and incoming and outgoing correspondence. Larger and different workflows will follow. For example, I aim to have all steps of developing a new project, including the feasibility process, on this structure, so that when a decision is made to acquire a building, the entire project workflow runs on PaperWork. We are moving forward step by step toward corporate continuity.”

What do users want?

GGSoft provides important support in all this planning, and feedback and expectations are put into practice quickly. “User testing,” which stands out and plays a key role in feedback to GGSoft, is what makes the project different. Under “user acceptance criteria,” İş GYO offers its employees suggestions and tries to learn what they want. Their feedback is then passed on to GGSoft. In other words, the feedback of the employees who will use the PaperWork infrastructure is decisive in this investment and makes the work with GGSoft efficient. Saying “Our employees’ expectations gave us strength,” Tolga YILMAZ added that the real decisive and efficiency-driving factors were the project plan with strong feasibility prepared with GGSoft, the strong will and determination of İş GYO management in light of this plan, and the speed with which the investment was adopted across the organization.

Since the real estate sector works in a very different way, workflows will again come to the fore in the next steps of the investment, and new processes will be designed in this area. Contract and proposal processes, different expense structures and the invoices they generate are all both a responsibility toward the state and customers and part of the healthy progress of the project. Public e-Transformation initiatives such as e-Fatura (Turkish e-invoice) and e-Arşiv Fatura (Turkish e-archive invoice) are planned to be added to the structure in 2016. Saying “The investment will take on a completely different form” in 2017, Tolga YILMAZ shared these hints: “Since 70% of the company’s business is invoices and 30% is projects, we have prepared a large diagram. Feasibility, proposal and permit stages, construction processes and design processes come first, and then the building starts. At many points in this process there is heavy document traffic, and a structure comes to life that ends with handing the keys over to the customer. After all, we do not build ourselves; we assign the work to a company, and there is a great deal of back-and-forth paperwork during the construction site phase. In this complex structure, starting with invoices and then adding incoming and outgoing correspondence to the system was important both for employee adoption and for building a base for the next steps. In this structure, which sums up how the real estate sector works, we will use many more PaperWork components.”

A continuous investment, strengthened by seamless communication

Taking all these transformation steps while the system was running ensured a seamless end-to-end flow across the entire process. Management seeing the benefits of this investment also created significant added value. GGSoft Project Manager Banu OĞUZ summarized the partnership and its advantages: “PaperWork is a product that continuously improves itself, and we share all changes with our customers. Thanks to its flexible software infrastructure, we can quickly build models that fit needs or requests. That is why customer feedback is very important, especially in our development steps. Offering a solution that can be personalized by need and industry sets us apart in the service, product and customer triangle. What really matters here is being able to manage the process within certain criteria and priorities. At İş GYO, the archiving project with PaperWork started in March 2015. After that, the focus shifted to process management. Since the archiving and workflow modules were designed as an integrated structure, PaperWork is now actively used by employees. We are activating the processes used by the entire company. Because it is critical that the system runs without interruption or errors, after the design and approval processes we spent a lot of time on testing at İş GYO. Guided by feedback from the test group formed within the company, the project progressed very smoothly for both sides. İş GYO not only made an investment decision internally, it also put in place an internal structure suited to this investment. We created good collaboration and a steady flow of feedback. This brought speed in identifying needs and making the necessary changes to the structures we set up.

With PaperWork’s living ecosystem, our process does not end: the investment continues, and our communication continues without interruption.”