TeamSystem drives business transformation with Microsoft Power Platform

“Our overarching plan is simple: to optimize our internal processes. If we can become more efficient across the business, what we are really doing is optimizing costs.”

Fabio Beccari, Group Head of Business Solutions at TeamSystem, is explaining the thinking behind the business’ push to enhance automation and streamline operations. As a leading tech company for digital business management solutions, TeamSystem acquires companies to expand its portfolio, integrating their solutions to provide a more extensive offer to clients.

“Our company experiences double-digit growth year-on-year,” says Beccari, “so we need to ensure that we can scale efficiently to maintain momentum and offer the same high-quality services no matter our size.”

“Therefore,” continues Beccari, “we’re always looking for ways standardize, manage, and improve operations while enabling users to create their own applications. That’s why we partnered with Microsoft and adopted its suite of technology.”

Starting the journey towards a centralized environment 

Based in Italy, TeamSystem offers business solutions to manage SMEs and professional firms to enable digital competitiveness. It has over 200 proprietary solutions and serves over 2.5 million customers across all seven countries where it operates, including Italy, France, Spain, and Turkey. 

“As we operate in multiple countries and across various businesses, we use a lot of different systems,” begins Beccari. “Over the past couple of years, we’ve been building a framework to help us to standardize our entire application stack for vertical processes.”

“But we have several processes that are outside of this landscape that we must manage,” says Beccari. “We needed to find an adaptable solution that could be integrated within different systems and fill the gaps in capabilities that we had.”

So, alongside Microsoft and partner AGIC, TeamSystem used Microsoft Power Platform to build a new infrastructure and explored how AI can help modernize legacy applications.

The platform inspires a cultural transformation

At the very beginning of the project, Microsoft organized a hackathon with the TeamSystem software developers to explain and demonstrate how Microsoft Power Platform works and what it can do.

“After the workshop, I spoke to one of the senior developers to gather feedback,” says Stefano Liguori, Chief Information Officer at TeamSystem. “He saw this technology as a new approach to how we develop, and he believed that it could be lifechanging—and he was right.”

“Using Microsoft Power Platform has transformed our developer culture,” says Liguori. “The technology is relatively simple to use, and we now have a channel with Microsoft that we join for training so if we want to deep dive into anything specific or we want to build a new use case, Microsoft is always on hand to help.”

TeamSystem’s developers have adopted the technology quickly, and building applications has sped up as they can now use the low code tools within the platform to code, automate, and integrate with other apps. “Microsoft Power Platform is so easy to use,” Liguori adds, “that we are seeing employees outside of our developer teams use this technology, training themselves to do so using online tools.”

The game-changing capabilities of AI are realized

For TeamSystem, this new-found speed is the main advantage the company has gained from adopting Microsoft technology. 

“We’ve really seen an increase in the velocity of development,” says Beccari. “This means we’ve been able to move away from using wireframes and instead build prototypes so we can show our business users the real product and how we can improve it. Combined with our change of mindset, we’ve been able to build some ready-to-use prototypes fast.”

Using platform tools, such as Power Apps, the company has also streamlined some of its internal processes, such as its cancellation service with customers. “We can now quickly manage the cancellation process and offer better solutions to clients that we have lost. The process used to take weeks, but we now complete the process in matter of days.”

“By making our internal processes more efficient,” continues Beccari, “we can improve how quickly we respond to our clients’ needs and provide better solutions which, in turn, helps with growth and retention.”

Legacy processes are optimized across the business

Another successful internal use case is the administration process for purchases, which previously could only be managed after the process began. So TeamSystem implemented 11 applications, collectively named the LD app, to manage the initial stage of the purchase process when a request must be submitted for a purchase offer. This allows the business to check if it has the budget to make the purchase, saving time and money in the long run. 

“What’s so interesting about this use case,” explains Beccari, “is that the LD app is the first application that we built for the Italian market that we have shared across other countries such as Spain because it’s so adaptable. We can integrate a current ERP with the legal entity that we acquire. If there isn’t an ERP to cover the process we are working on, we can manage the purchase process solely with this app.”

“The application is really useful and brings us a very competitive advantage for cost control,” Beccari adds.

Efficiency gains like this free up time for employees to work on more innovative products that allow the business to scale. They can start by building a single feature and then easily extend the project to build entire applications which are then easily integrated into the ecosystem.

Leading the way on the international stage

Off the back of its success, TeamSystem has big plans to expand the use of Power Platform across the company, building on the foundation it’s created so far. 

“We’ve started to build agents using Copilot Studio, a tool from the platform, to help employees better use our suite of products,” explains Beccari. “But in future, we hope to introduce the technology and the training to employees in different departments, from marketing to finance, so they can build their own agents to improve productivity which feeds into our overall business strategy.”

“We also have plans to explore governance within Power Platform and to create a center of excellence to manage all of our applications and operations,” says Baccari.

“But this process isn't just about implementing innovative technology and taking advantage of the benefits internally,” adds Beccari. “We’re approaching a change of mindset, not just in Italy, but at a European level. By integrating this technology and standardizing everything we do, we’ve become a real differentiator and gained a competitive edge in the international landscape.”