(soft music)
- Hi, my name is Pieter Schikkerling.
I live in South Africa and I am currently,
the General Manager for Information Technology,
for the MTO Group of Companies.
At MTO our vision and our mission is to reshape
and transform the African timber and agricultural landscape
sustainably and responsibly.
We've got many different focuses across our business,
and some of these are the production of high quality timber
lumber and pole products.
We also sustainably power a lot of our own operations
through energy production of biomass,
which is an off cut of some of our products.
We've got agricultural operations within our environment.
We do a lot of training with individuals within
our own environment, as well as a lot of our contractors.
We've got a credit training facilities
that actually take care of that.
We also focus on the economic transformation
in our areas of operation,
through sustainable economic development and enterprise
and supply and development initiatives.
So how did the COVID-19 impact MTO?
Well at MTO through the screening solution
that we put in place,
we've been able to scan 72,119 individuals,
and those individuals consisted of not only
our own employees, but contractors, consultants,
and visitors, so in other words,
anyone that has visited any of our facilities,
have gone through our screening process.
In terms of infections and where MTO stands,
we've had 87 tests conducted through medical facilities,
of those 61 tests came back negative,
we had 25 positive cases,
but we've also unfortunately had two deaths
within the organization.
More recently as of the 31st of August,
we've had 124 individuals self isolate,
of which recently 123 actually returned back to work.
We've also had 18 new self-isolations,
in the last couple of days.
So in terms of the technology
that we used for this platform.
So we looked at a bunch of different Microsoft products,
and the one that we ended up settling with,
was the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice solution.
And that worked quite nicely for us 'cause we were able
to create the questions in the survey
and then through those questions and the branching rules
that we'd set up in the background,
we were then able to use the Power Automate,
to then link to the various different other systems
that we've made use of.
So we use Power Automate to pull all that information
into a Live SharePoint List.
We also used Power Automates to set up the email
and SMS alerts,
and then what we did was we connected Power BI,
to the Live SharePoint List to actually pull their live data
and to have that display in a Power BI dashboard.
So how exactly do we build the solution?
Well, it's actually quite easy.
So what we did was, as I mentioned previously,
we use the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice platform.
So we created a list of questions and we started off
with wanting to know the date, your name,
are you an employee of our company?
Are you a contractor?
Are you a consultant or are you a day visitor?
And also to which site you're reporting
within our particular region.
And then obviously what we did was we set up
quite a bit of branching rules around that.
So depending on which question you answered,
it would then expose or provide a couple of other questions
to you so that we could actually figure out,
the extent to which you were a threat or a risk
to the rest of the business.
What we then did was we also used Power Automate
to actually create alerts, and we did that using conditions.
So if I said, my name is Pieter, I am in Cape town,
I'm in South Africa and I am at this particular site
within Cape town, and I said, yes, as an example,
to having a temperature of higher than 40 degrees,
I would then have an alert sent
to the particular manager in that area, in that branch,
as well as the safety officer.
And the way that we did this was with Power Automate,
sending an email based on the selections that the user made,
in terms of where they were, which site they were at,
I would then pre-populate that information
into an email alert that would then get triggered
based on the user's answer.
And I did exactly the same with SMS notifications,
and you would probably at this point ask,
okay but why did you use SMS notifications?
Well the answer is quite simple,
in forestry and in South Africa,
we don't always have the best signal.
And because in our industry, in forestry,
we are quite often in a forest and far away
from a lot of the metropolitan areas,
signal becomes an issue.
So with SMS, you then obviously get the message
irrespective of whether you've got 4G, 5G, 3G,
you can have a signal as weak as GPRS,
you will still get that message,
and that was very important for us.
So we kept it very simple.
What you currently see on the screen,
is an example of what the email looks like,
that alerts the manager,
as well as the safety officer on the site.
And you will also see the SMS.
So on the top of the screen,
you'll see COVID screening response,
please check MTO employee, we've blanked out the name
for obvious confidentiality reasons.
And then you see the location are George Sawmill,
then if you read through the body of the message,
it'll give you the name of the individual,
which has again been blanked out.
So individuals so and so an MTO employee,
and as I said, we catered for employees, visitors,
contractors, and consultants.
So depending on who answers a question
and what the output is, it could say,
Mr. so and so an MTO employee,
or Mr. so and so a consultant, or Mr. so and so a visitor.
Location, George Sawmill has selected an answer
on the daily COVID-19 screening questionnaire,
which needs to be investigated.
Meaning that if you get this message,
you know that they have said yes to a critical question,
that would cause concern for us to make sure
that we need to isolate that individual.
And then if you look at the text message example
at the bottom, you'll then see the same information
that comes through a text message.
Please investigate individual so and so,
an MTO employee, location, the George Sawmill,
regarding a prescreening questionnaire results.
So what you're looking at right now is an example
of the BI report that we pulled from SharePoint.
So we integrated our Power BI into the SharePoint List
and we pulled those results.
So in this example, we've got 64 people that have completed
the COVID screening questionnaire,
and then we've broken it down to three categories
for obvious reasons.
So we wanted to know who the critical users were,
so that we can get the notifications out
to those individuals.
And then we wanted to know who had medical conditions.
So someone potentially with bad lungs
or whatever the case may be,
so that we could take care of those individuals
and make sure that we don't bring them to the office
and keep them at home because they might be at higher risk.
And then obviously we wanted to know
some of the non-critical symptoms,
which would have been potentially cause for concern,
depending on whether those conditions got worse or not.
And then obviously the critical symptoms,
as I mentioned with the automatic notifications.
So why did we choose this solution,
and what were the benefits of this solution?
Well, I think first and foremost,
this solution helped us to save lives
and to curb the spread of the virus.
A number of the other benefits that was
a big determining factor for us,
is that it was cost effective,
which is really, really easy to use.
And there's also very effective reporting,
that was very easy to set up.
The other big thing is that
there was really easy integration,
it was very easy for us to set up real time notifications.
It was also compatible with almost all devices,
phones, PCs, laptops.
We were also able to very effectively share the solution
with a number of our contractors and our consultants,
at no additional cost,
which just made it that much easier.
And I think lastly, the solution is very, very easy,
for other Microsoft customers to replicate.
So that really goes a long way,
when you know there are that many people
that use the Microsoft platform.
And it's easy just to show them how to do that,
like we've done in this video to replicate it.
So those were our main reasons.
Thank you everyone for your time,
it's really been a pleasure building the solution
with the Microsoft technology.
If you have any questions around this technology,
you're welcome to look me up on LinkedIn,
as I said, my name is Pieter Schikkerling,
you'll find me there and I'm happy to address any questions
that you might have.
Thank you for your time and take care.
(soft music)