Colas Group uses Power Platform to fuel innovation—and responsible, sustainable solutions

Building responsible, sustainable infrastructures

With a focus on creating innovative and sustainable mobility solutions, the Colas Group wants to lead the way in revolutionizing road and railroad transportation infrastructure responsibly. The international construction company—a subsidiary of Bouygues Group—has led or contributed to successful construction projects in more than 50 countries. 

Maintaining exemplary standards across a company with more than 57,000 employees across the globe requires staying connected and ensuring continuity—especially when it comes to data accessibility, processing, and reporting. The Colas Group relies on technology to help. “Of course, technology plays a huge role for us to support our global Digital & Data transformation. It’s helping us to stay efficient, innovative, and competitive,” says Thomas Rollin, Innovation Lead at Colas Digital Solutions, a special team within the Colas Group dedicated to supporting the organization’s broader digital transformation needs.

Colas Digital Solutions helps the Colas Group, across all of its subsidiaries around the world, to consistently create leading-edge solutions aligned with operational and business needs. With rapid growth, and new challenges and business requirements arising on a regular basis, Colas Digital Solutions identified Microsoft Power Platform as a foundational tool and development accelerator to help deliver results quickly and at a lower cost for a variety of critical use cases. 

“Power Platform is a great opportunity to accelerate our global digital transformation, linked to our business stakeholder. It also aligned with our data strategy.”

Three recent projects highlight Colas Group solutions based on Microsoft Power Platform and utilizing Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. The solutions helped the organization develop a more accurate and efficient approach to managing legal processes, create a solution to collect and process data related to pollution remediation, and create a digital assistant to help report important data from the field. The next sections offer insight into these use cases.

Automating legal processes

There was a time when email and Microsoft Excel files significantly expedited important administrative and legal tasks. The Colas Group legal division had relied on these systems to help manage everything from risk issues to contracts to litigations, and more. The group also fielded a lot of physical paperwork. But the company’s growth in transportation infrastructure projects worldwide was creating an increase in documents, data, and disparate data silos. 

“It was becoming increasingly difficult for the company’s legal division to quickly access the information it needed to make accurate risk and cost assessments,” says Rollin. He knew that it could use Microsoft Power Platform to help centralize company data. “Power Platform is easy to learn and work with. We knew we could develop a solution in-house in a shorter amount of time and at a lower cost than hiring an outside vendor,” says Rollin.

Working closely with the company’s legal division, Colas Digital Solutions created a central scalable platform to unify global data sources and employed Power Apps and Power Automate to digitally manage and automate legal processes. This included creating a LRC (Litigation, Risk, Cost) application that connects and synchronizes critical workflows with a set of prebuilt actions.  The result is a more streamlined and accurate way to assess risk and report on litigation and associated costs. 

“Utilizing cutting-edge technology helps us ensure accuracy in our assessments and reporting—and helps us mitigate risk,” says Rollin. “And, with a scalable solution that puts the data we need in hand, we can save time and resources as we continue to grow and transform responsibly.”

Processing pollution remediation data

The organization’s core business already contributes to reducing carbon dioxide levels and providing sustainable and more environmentally responsible transportation infrastructures worldwide. But there is always more to do, and the organization is committed to not just monitoring its own impact on the environment in the places it works, but rehabilitating locations polluted by other industries.

Colas Environment is a specialized division that helps the broader organization focus on caring for the environment. When Colas Environment needed a digital solution for capturing and processing data related to pollution remediation, it turned to Colas Digital Solutions, which advocated using Power Platform. 

“Remediation projects can take several years, so there are a lot of human interventions required to take readings and samples on site,” says Jean-Michel Maillet, Power Platform lead for Colas Digital Solutions. Prior to the solution, supervisors took temperature, soil, air, and water measurements onsite and documented the data manually on paper. This process made it challenging to conduct data analysis or generate useful insights. “The idea of this project was to automate all of these operations,” says Maillet.

Colas Digital Solutions created the e-DEPOL application using Power Apps and Power BI. e-DEPOL enables a more efficient onsite process for documenting and processing pollution remediation data—and delivers data analytics and insight generation through Power BI reports. “The challenge was to move from a paper and pencil or Excel file solution to a solution built around data,” says Maillet. e-DEPOL has done that and more, serving as a tool for improving operational excellence. “In addition to making a big difference in the daily operations of Colas Environment. This is a perfect example of how the Power Platform is helping us to bring value to our field operations.”

Creating a low-code digital assistant

Colas North America needed an effective way to digitally gather critical data about equipment and heavy machinery from various construction sites in a user-friendly way. “Our challenge was that often the people collecting data at our construction sites didn’t have an easy way to connect with Colas Group IT systems,” says Sebastien Wickert, Director of Digital Transformation, Colas North America. “We needed a solution that could provide a familiar user experience with little to no technology learning curve.”

Wickert and his team used Power Automate integrated with Twilio to develop a digital assistant solution known as DARCI. DARCI, or Digital Assistant with Repartee for Colas Inc., is a chatbot that gathers critical data from the field. Workers can scan a QR code on the equipment and input responses to preconfigured questions via SMS text on their mobile devices. “For reporting, there is no app to download, staff in the field can simply text DARCI,” says Wickert. For Colas North America, the solution is reducing paperwork, increasing operational efficiencies, and making life easier for employees. But, above all else, says Wickert, it is opening the Colas IT systems to field users who never had access before.

With DARCI, users can also automatically create maintenance work orders in the Colas Group ERP system. Equipment mechanics can receive and update those work orders via DARCI Garage, a related mobile app developed with Microsoft Power Apps. “It’s a highly effective yet easy, accessible, and low-cost solution for doing daily tasks faster,” says Wickert.

In fact, it’s working so well that DARCI is being applied to other tasks across the organization. “We are excited about being able to teach DARCI more skills so rapidly,” says Wickert.

Creating cost-effective transformation solutions

The Colas Group knows that being a leader in transportation infrastructure and sustainable mobility requires a commitment to continuous innovation, both internally and in the field. Transformation solutions based on Microsoft Power Platform are helping the organization deliver cost-effective results fast. “With Power Platform we can quickly and easily create innovative solutions that are flexible, scalable, and really work for the industrial needs of Colas,” says Wickert. 

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