Days instead of weeks. 100 apps that transformed ECHO Investment

From scattered data…

ECHO Investment's business model is built around a long development cycle: roughly 5 years pass from land purchase to unit handover. Warranty service then runs for up to 10 years after the building goes into use.

The longer the project and the more investments running in parallel, the more the organization's efficiency mattered. And three main factors stood in its way:

• Scattered data. Information came from many sources: a multitude of small, local IT solutions and hundreds of Excel spreadsheets.
• No process standards. Procedures and best practices were, at best, documented on paper.
• Division into silos. The organization was split into silos. Each one wanted to manage its data its own way, and at the same time they all struggled to communicate with one another.

…to a coherent, digital work environment

ECHO Investment began digitalizing its processes in 2017, when the growing scale of its investments exposed the limits of scattered data: information was inconsistent and hard to keep current.

The breakthrough was a decision to build an integrated process environment and bring the business into designing solutions.

„To build dozens of dedicated applications that handle our specific processes, we had to find a platform that would let us mass-produce applications, manage them easily, and change them quickly whenever the business asked. WEBCON lets us deliver our digitalization strategy exactly on those terms.”

Paweł Hołdak, Partner & Digital Transformation Leader w bpmRiders

4 pillars of digital transformation at ECHO Investment

The scale of the project called for a clear strategy. So the company defined four pillars of digital transformation and then applied them consistently at every stage of the work:

1. Everything must be digital
   Data, practices, knowledge — everything.
2. Everything must be integrated 
   You can't afford to move data by hand or maintain many separate solutions. You need an integrated business process platform with a single data model.
3. Everything will change
   Anything built on the platform has to be easy to fix, easy to adapt, and easy to evolve. 
4. Everything must be participatory 
   Key business and IT users are involved in the digitalization project and work together.

Business needs at the center of the transformation

Every organization that sets out to digitalize its processes faces a similar choice. The first path is an off-the-shelf system. The second is building solutions tailored to the company, step by step. ECHO Investment deliberately chose the second.

„System maturity is something entirely different from organizational maturity. Rolling out a off-the-shelf product to an organization that is only starting its technology implementations, only learning what digitalization is, is a completely different situation from doing so in one that is entering its next stage of digital transformation.”

Agata Skowrońska-Domańska, Vice President of the Management Board and CFO at Archicom

That decision called for a new way of working. Instead of searching for, buying, and deploying separate tools for every need, the company had to prepare itself to build applications on its own, through the combined effort of the business and IT. To do so, it drew on two strategies.

"Realizing how many areas of the organization we needed to support, how many applications we had to deliver and then be able to maintain, completely changed our approach. Instead of searching for, evaluating, buying, and deploying separate solutions, we had to prepare the organization to build the applications we needed through the combined effort of the business and the IT department."

Paweł Hołdak Partner & Digital Transformation Leader at bpmRiders

Fusion team: different skills, a shared goal

The strategy the company chose could only work on one condition: the business couldn't be just a recipient of finished solutions. It had to co-create them. To make that happen, the organization set up multidisciplinary teams to digitalize individual processes. Each one brought together a subject matter expert from the business, an IT expert, a WEBCON consultant, and a project manager. These were the fusion teams.

Citizen-assisted development. A recipe for engaging the business

Designer Desk and the citizen-assisted development approach made it possible to engage the business directly. The company identified its champions: users who stand out for their proactive attitude, understand the platform's role in digitalization, and are open to collaboration.

After just a 3-hour training session, these champions were designing forms in Designer Desk, describing process logic, and defining workflows. The result was an application prototype that the IT department then developed further. Every application built this way is integrated into ECHO's environment.

The system – a by-product of maturity

Over 6 years, the organization deployed more than 100 applications supporting different areas of its business. Among them are applications for managing construction projects, project budgets, and the back office. As a result, what changed was not only the speed of delivering solutions, but also the organization's maturity. 

"Initially, our processes were less organized and relied on manual reports. Now we have a much better-integrated and efficient system that supports us in every aspect of our operations. For example, our tendering team calculated that by leveraging technology and preparing the entire tender process in an application, their productivity increased by 20%."

Agata Skowrońska-Domańska, Vice President of the Management Board and CFO at Archicom

Bring the business into your digital transformation

Involve the business in building applications and see how it changes your organization.

"IT better understands business reality and objectives. The business better understands technological challenges, too. People started working in a smarter way. The company became smarter as a result."

Agata Skowrońska-Domańska, Vice President of the Management Board and CFO at Archicom

Get in touch — our expert will show you how to use Designer Desk and WEBCON for the benefit of your entire company.