ExCel London automates 94% of manual emails with Jotform Enterprise

ExCeL London is an international exhibition and convention center in the Royal Docks district of East London. Its 230 staff support roughly 400 events annually, providing services for visitors, exhibitors, and event organizers. Not surprisingly, ExCeL London manages a lot of data.

Before turning to Jotform Enterprise, ExCeL London didn’t have a single system of record for all this data, making cross-department collaboration difficult. Departments often received the same information but saved it in different places.

ExCeL London’s business systems analyst James Watts knew Jotform Enterprise could streamline operations and communications.

“What pushed Jotform Enterprise ahead of other solutions,” says Watts, “was that instead of filling out a Word document, sending it for approval, receiving it back, putting it on DocuSign, dragging in 10 signature fields, and waiting weeks for one person to respond, we can map out the entire process — including those requiring 11 stages of signatures — press a button, and it’s gone.

“We don’t have to worry about it,” he says. “The form comes back timestamped, and we get a nice polished PDF at the end of the workflow delivered straight to our inbox. It’s ideal.”

Watts first used Jotform Enterprise to manage a process for the World Travel Market, a huge gathering of travel and tourism professionals. It’s the only event for which ExCeL London uses external catering companies. The process of accepting applications from catering companies was manual and rigorous. ExCeL London staff sent more than 3,000 emails over three months to collect applications and payments.

Watts transformed the process with a Jotform card-style form that walks caterers through the application and leverages conditional logic to show or hide pages (based on the application type), perform calculations, and automate the process.

“The drag and drop fields make it very quick to create something tangible and integrated into a workflow,” says Watts. “In the first year I implemented the new process using Jotform Enterprise, the number of emails was reduced from 3,000 to 180.”

What Watts likes most is that the approval letters for accepted applicants are automatically generated using Jotform’s PDF Editor instead of needing to be manually created. “All the approval letters create themselves,” he says.

Within a few months of implementing Jotform Enterprise, ExCeL London created 45 forms, and requests for 60 more forms were received from multiple departments.

“Every time I speak with a team about Jotform Enterprise, I can see lightbulbs going off in their minds about all the forms they’ve got in Excel, Word, and PDFs that they are itching to get onto the platform,” says Watts.

ExCeL London is migrating its DocuSign forms and documents to Jotform Sign to take advantage of its e-signature automation features. It’s also considering Jotform Enterprise Professional Services to expedite platform adoption.

Managing complex workflows with Jotform Enterprise

To ensure quality experiences for attendees, ExCeL London’s event management team built an 85-point checklist and dashboard with Jotform Enterprise to ensure every detail of an event is reviewed and approved before the event begins.

Previously, the checklist was tracked in Excel and managed over emails and phone calls, resulting in staff saving the same documents in different places.

Says Watts:

There’s a huge amount of things to do before an event can go live, and more often than not, these items weren’t being ticked off. At the same time, the event managers, health and safety team, and sales team all need transparency and for information to flow between them. With Jotform’s approval flows and Enterprise account features, we’re creating that circular workflow that everyone can contribute to.

Using Jotform Enterprise, event organizers upload documents into a single form that pushes them out to the teams that need to see them. In turn, event managers can click the form link, see everything that’s been uploaded, and mark items as completed.

Saving time with Jotform Enterprise

Watts is working on several forms to save ExCeL London 1,000 hours within the first year of implementing Jotform Enterprise. “Preferably 2,000,” he says.

One of those forms is for approving discounts for customers. Staff are authorized to give discounts, but the chain of approval wasn’t consistently followed, and the company needed a way to track and understand their value.

This one form and approval workflow will save teams about 300 hours across the year.

James Watts, business systems analyst, ExCeL London

Watts created a form that displays different variables based on the department filling it out, calculates the discount based on the inputs, and routes the request through the appropriate approval channels.

The form also supports communication between departments.

In the past, the sales team would sometimes offer free IT services, but that information didn’t always make it to the teams responsible for providing those services. “The customer would come on site and ask, ‘Where’s our free 10-gigabit connection?’ and the IT team would say, ’Well, we don’t know about that,’” says Watts. “Now, those teams are automatically notified once the sales form is approved.

“This one form and approval workflow will save teams about 300 hours across the year,” says Watts.

Watts also automated a 10-page capital expenditure document using Jotform Approvals. Once staff provide the required data, the relevant stakeholders are auto-populated on the backend and the request automatically routes to six different departments.

The form also auto-generates the Export Administration Regulations number needed for purchase orders. It uses conditional logic that, depending on the amount of the expense, routes the request to executives for approval, who sign on behalf of the owners. Everyone involved in the process receives an email when the expense is approved.

Keeping departments and systems connected with Jotform Enterprise

Watts and his colleagues use Jotform Teams to organize ExCeL London’s forms by department and assign forms to the appropriate people.

The exhibitor services department is building an e-commerce solution with Jotform Enterprise that prompts customers to attach their floor plans and calculates the total price of their exhibit space.

“We’re able to pull that information into our ERP system, Momentus, using API, and we’re testing pushing information back so we can make the sale and generate the order in Momentus to push that through to our finance system and create a circular economy of systems,” says Watts.

To keep stakeholders and board members informed about form performance and recommended improvements, Watts uses Jotform’s form analytics. “We’re becoming a very data-driven organization, so any data we can extract from Jotform Enterprise is good data,” says Watts.

Watts is also a big fan of Jotform’s automated reporting. “I can use Report Builder to get the graphs I want and send it straight to the department heads and directors,” says Watts. “They’re so excited because they can reuse it in their board reports.”

Jotform Enterprise helps individuals grow in their careers

Watts encourages individuals looking to make an impact in their organizations to start using Jotform.

“Creating a form is very easy to do,” says Watts. “People sometimes say, ‘I don’t wanna burden you with another form.’ I’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, this will literally take me 20 minutes to put the fields in, add conditional logic, and…here’s the link. Start using it.’”

“Jotform Enterprise has improved my process and my career,” he says. “I’ve used it not just for ExCeL London, but when I was consulting.” Jotform Enterprise has become Watts’ go-to solution. “When someone has a problem with their process, more often than not, I immediately think, ‘We can do that with Jotform Enterprise.’”

Photo by cottonbro studio