“Having worked with CTG before, I knew that their team could handle this time-sensitive project with significant cost implications. They moved quickly, solved challenges as they arose, and delivered ahead of schedule, helping us avoid a major licensing cost.”
– Bobby Ham, Global IT Manager, Indoviny

The Challenge and Opportunity

Indovinya, a subsidiary of the global sustainable chemical company Indorama Ventures, specializes in the production of specialty chemicals and surfactants. CTG has worked with Indorama and its subsidiaries for nearly 10 years, becoming a trusted IT partner for application services, including development, migration, and management. Indovinya’s mission-critical invoice application was built in Microsoft SharePoint and relied on complex Nintex automation workflows. With Microsoft phasing out support for these workflows and an upcoming six-figure license renewal, the company wanted to quickly eliminate its dependency on Nintex. Their goal was to replace the existing workflow functionality using Microsoft Power Platform, leveraging their investment in Microsoft 365. Facing a tight and potentially costly migration timeline, Indovinya turned to CTG, confident in our ability to deliver on time based on previous successful engagements.

The Solution and Results

The project began with a comprehensive evaluation of existing Nintex workflows and design of equivalent functionality in Microsoft Power Platform. CTG ensured the new workflows closely mirrored current processes and functionality. After the design phase, the team began developing new workflows. As an added benefit, CTG streamlined approval workflows with a “lazy approval” option in Microsoft Teams, allowing business stakeholders to work through approvals more conveniently. During User Acceptance Testing (UAT), the CTG and Indovinya teams validated the functionality. Due to careful planning and development, the teams identified  no bugs.

After UAT and acceptance from stakeholders, the application was ready to be deployed. However, disabling the old workflows was not sufficient to remove Nintex’s embedded presence within the environment, causing unexpected behavior in the  new invoice application. To resolve this, the team pivoted to building a new dedicated SharePoint site for the application, completely removing any residual elements of Nintex. This swift adjustment minimized business impact and kept the project ahead of schedule.

During creation of the new SharePoint site, the team identified corrupt data, such as duplicate, invalid, and old tasks. This revealed that users had been using back-end workarounds to mitigate issues they had with the old application. While this allowed them to avoid initial challenges, it created corrupt data. The CTG team cleaned up the data and updated settings within the new SharePoint site to prevent users from making similar changes in the future. Both actions would assist in maintaining a cleaner, more stable application in production  going forward.

With a firm deadline, this project required constant, dedicated focus. To ensure on-time deployment, the developers worked planned overtime hours in the early development stages to get ahead of the curve. This enabled the team to complete the deployment ahead of schedule despite the unforeseen challenges with disabling Nintex workflows that required rebuilding the SharePoint site and delayed application rollout.

The CTG team provided post-go-live application support to ensure a smooth transition to the new application while also addressing issues that arose once all stakeholders were actively using it. One such issue involved multiple erroneous invoice attachments in email notifications. The development team researched the issue and found a simple, previously unidentified error in workflow logic. They corrected the logic and double-checked all other workflow steps for accuracy. To enable long-term success, we conducted a thorough Knowledge Transfer and provided detailed application support documentation to empower Indovinya stakeholders to manage the application independently.

CTG’s support for this application enabled Indovinya to eliminate its Nintex dependency before the license renewal deadline, providing a six-figure cost savings. Users have responded positively to the new application, particularly appreciating the familiar user interface and streamlined approval functionality CTG delivered leveraging Microsoft Teams, and have reported increased efficiency as a result of the new application.