With Nintex Automation K2, First Solar is streamlining development times to deliver solutions faster for greater business value.
U.S.-headquartered First Solar produces high-performance thin film photovoltaic (PV) modules, designed and developed at its R&D centers in California and Ohio, that deliver the lowest carbon solar available today. With a manufacturing footprint that spans the United States, Malaysia, and Vietnam, it is the only U.S.-headquartered company among the world’s largest solar manufacturers.
Efficiency is important to First Solar in more ways than one. The company is using Nintex Automation K2 to innovate solutions across the organization, improving employee efficiency while simplifying its technology landscape. With around 30 production applications launched, Nintex Automation K2 is recognized company wide as a tool that is delivering business solutions.
Eliminating manual work
Challenge: Email and Excel-based processes
Before First Solar implemented Nintex Automation K2, the company was still functioning in startup mode, with a large portion of work being conducted in email or via Excel spreadsheets. As it started to grow its IT infrastructure, the company realized it needed to automate processes to save employees the headache of all that manual work and to create operational efficiency.
Initially, the company looked into using SharePoint’s built-in workflow tools. However, this provided no single way to manage all the different workflows in one place.
Solution: Centralized support for automated processes
The company brought in the Nintex Automation K2 process automation platform in order to centralize support while gaining the flexibility to build workflows in the way management needed. Today, with about 30 applications deployed—from an intricate change management system to the company’s document control center—Nintex Automation K2 is known by name across the organization as a solutions provider.
“Nintex Automation K2 gives us the ability to get solutions out the door a lot faster,” says Charles Carr, Manager of IT at First Solar. “We’ve been able to get the same amount of work done in less time but with better quality.”
As it seeks to ensure that its internal rate of change keeps pace with external dynamics, the company has undertaken a significant internal transformation. After assessing which tools were most important to the company, the group determined that Nintex Automation K2 delivers an immense amount of value, supporting many of its major applications.
In fact, First Solar’s Nintex Automation K2 capability management tool helps the Continuous Improvement Group to gain insight into those applications, including capabilities and cost figures, automatically translating that data to Tableau reports. According to Carr, “We use Nintex Automation K2 to manage the forms and inputs to create the relationship between the business capability, which is the1n tied to spend to applications, which is also then tied to spend usage—two metrics that we’re trying to track. And Nintex Automation K2 is what ties it all together for us.” This saved the company around $50,000 on an enterprise architecture (EA) tool, which would have to have been purchased to do the same thing. “So we’re using Nintex Automation K2 to both deliver business results,” says Carr, “and to manage those results.”
