Scaling office-as-a-service business by automating sales materials and quotes
Who
SleevesUp! is a leading provider of innovative and flexible serviced offices with 13 locations in 10 cities across Germany and more than 10,000 sqm of total space.
They offer a wide range of modern working facilities, from fully-equipped office space and professional conference rooms to coworking options in shared workspaces.
Companies of all sizes discover full flexibility and premium amenities every day to successfully implement their projects with a focus on a modern and prestigious working environment.
The challenge
With a growing number of locations and customers, creating sales materials and other documents by hand did not scale. Every slight change of information required updates in too many places.
Creating quotes in Word as well as updating sales material appeared to be extremely time-consuming. Additionally, manual tasks raised the risk of human errors like typos, misplaced comma, or transposed digits.
The solution
The SleevesUp! team started with the Microsoft Power Automate platform and moved all information into a database. However, the included document creation and conversion capabilities did not meet their needs. Especially embedding their custom font was not supported by many of the solutions, resulting in documents not complying with corporate design standards.
Having checked supported connectors and searched for alternatives, they decided to try the Plumsail Documents connector for Power Automate. It allows creating PDF documents from HTML, DOCX, and PPTX files as well as generating HTML, DOCX, and PPTX files based on templates.
The driver for trying Plumsail Documents was its support of custom fonts when generating PDF files. The “Folder” pricing option made it easy to start without a large financial commitment in the first place.
With Plumsail Documents connector, the SleevesUp! team now has an automated generation of always up-to-date sales materials with the latest features, prices, etc.
"We accelerated the generation of quotes and other standardized documents. For the latter, we built a custom interface that allows our employees to create the documents with just a few clicks, completely removing any manual lookup tasks for prices, addresses, etc." - Sebastian Fuss, managing director.
The results
“We can only give estimates, but the creation of a quote took around 20 minutes before any automation, now creating a quote takes around 5-6 minutes (including the time it takes the server to generate and serve the file).”
“Regarding the sales material now only have to change the bit of information in the database and trigger the generation flow, a few minutes later we have the updated PDF file in our file share system. Previously updating sales material required manually opening 3 different PPTX or DOCX files, updating the same information in all of them, saving the files as PDF, and copying over the PDF files to the file share system. The approximate productivity increase is about 70-80%.” - Sebastian Fuss, managing director.
