Fairwinds Technologies is a value-added pass-through reseller serving government agencies, essentially functioning as “the easy button for the government” enabling agencies to source items and have them delivered efficiently.
As Vice President of Operations, Raye Ragan drives operational excellence initiatives at this rapidly growing government contractor.
The Challenge: Navigating Rapid Growth Without Standardization
Before Process Street, Fairwinds Technologies operated in what Raye describes as a rapidly changing and evolving company with limited standardized processes. Critical information lived across Outlook folders and Excel spreadsheets, making consistency, accountability, and visibility nearly impossible.
How did things look before implementing Process Street?
“Before Process Street, everything lived in Outlook or Excel; email folders, spreadsheet trackers, you name it. As a newer company, we had almost no defined processes. It felt like constant reaction mode: working hard to keep things moving without a clear structure.”
Onboarding was one of the biggest pain points.
- Pre-onboarding required 1–2 weeks of emailing IT, managers, FSO, and insurance to confirm each new hire’s needs.
- New hires then required 5–7 business days to complete I-9s, insurance elections, and training, often asking “what’s due?” and missing steps.
- HR manually chased multiple teams and tracked 10–20 simultaneous hires without any centralized visibility.
The challenges were particularly acute during high-volume periods. Operating with a lean team, the HR director managed onboarding multiple employees simultaneously while manually tracking each person’s progress.
Finance, operations, and compliance teams constantly communicated with one another via endless email chains, creating bottlenecks and confusion. With government contracts requiring strict compliance certifications like ISO 9001 and CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification), Raye personally managed calendar reminders to reach out to five different people for routine compliance checks; a time-consuming process that scaled poorly as the company grew.
The Solution: Building a Command Center for Operations and Compliance
When Fairwinds’ COO discovered Process Street and championed it as a C-suite initiative, Raye quickly became a believer. What started as an HR onboarding tool rapidly evolved into a comprehensive operational platform as the team discovered new applications across the organization.
What was your experience implementing and using Process Street?
“Process Street is so intuitive and easy to use. I love that you actually take feedback from us when we say, ‘It would be great if we could do this.’ It feels like, within six months, that feature or something even better will appear. The platform has evolved and grown amazingly. We started using it only for HR onboarding, and now we use it extensively for operations and to manage our international certification processes. It’s been a fantastic tool, and it’s continued to evolve right along with our needs.”
Fairwinds built multiple workflow categories to address their diverse operational needs:
- Employee Onboarding: The HR team created comprehensive onboarding workflows that automatically assign tasks to finance (for system setup), timekeeping (for time tracking access), security (for background checks & facility access), and IT (for account set up and access permissions). This eliminated the need for the HR director to coordinate with each department manually.
- Project Setup: When the company receives a government order, program managers launch a project setup workflow that simultaneously alerts finance to configure their ERP system, notifies quality teams about required inspections, and flags timekeeping personnel to set up billing codes. This workflow runs multiple times daily and has grown from three tasks to fifteen as their contract complexity increased.
- Compliance Certification Management: Perhaps the most unexpected benefit came from compliance. Fairwinds created 16 scheduled workflows that automatically run quarterly or biannually to maintain certifications required for government contracting. These workflows go out to appropriate team members to verify physical security systems, fire inspections, cybersecurity protocols, and quality assurance measures.
- Audit Preparation: When auditors request evidence of compliance, Raye can now export PDF reports of workflow runs showing dates, tasks completed, and who signed off, providing clean audit trails without scrambling through email archives or manual logs.
How has Process Street changed your relationship with auditors?
“We’ll pull down a PDF of the workflow and say, ‘Here are the dates, here’s what was done, and here’s who signed off on it,’ and we use that as an artefact to show auditors we’re following our processes. Our onboarding workflow is one we often show because it demonstrates our new hire process. It clearly shows the work being done, that physical and information access is controlled from day one”.
The platform’s flexibility enabled Fairwinds to refine its processes continuously. Conditional logic ensures workflows adapt to specific project requirements, and scheduled workflows eliminate manual reminders entirely.
The Results: From Firefighting to Strategic Operations
The implementation of Process Street delivered transformational results across Fairwinds Technologies:
- Pre onboarding cut from 1–2 weeks to 2–3 days
- New hire onboarding has been reduced from 5–7 days to 2–3 days
- 16 compliance certification workflows now run automatically on quarterly or biannual schedules, eliminating manual tracking
- Multiple daily project setups processed seamlessly, even during peak government fiscal year-end periods
- Simultaneous onboarding of 10-20 employees managed efficiently by a single HR person
- Zero manual coordination required between departments during onboarding; automated task assignments handle cross-functional work
- Audit preparation time was dramatically reduced by instantly exporting workflow PDFs instead of compiling evidence from scattered sources
- Project management workload is distributed across finance, quality, and operations teams through automated notifications
Regarding their employee onboarding workflow, Raye notes, “We get a lot of really great feedback from new hires of how easy it is to onboard at our company because of that workflow.”
How has Process Street changed compliance management for your team?
“Before Process Street, I was the task master for the bulk of the certification compliance tasks. Implementing the compliance workflows shifted that responsibility to Process Street. Now I am solely responsible for my actual tasks and Process Street ensures everyone else provides their associated input.”
The operations team particularly benefited from the project setup workflow. As government contracts grew more complex, the workflow evolved from three tasks to fifteen, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. All key players are pulled into the information circle at the start of a project to include finance, procurement, system admins, & quality.
Perhaps most tellingly, Raye has become such an advocate that she discusses Process Street at industry conferences and regularly demonstrates the platform to other government contractors facing similar operational challenges.
How would you describe Process Street to others in regulated industries?
“I’m always a huge advocate and big fan. You can build a really complex workflow or something as simple as a two-task reminder you need every quarter. I love showing people how easy it is to drop things in, set up logic with simple yes-or-no questions, and build exactly what you need. I advocate for Fairwinds, and I advocate for Process Street.”
Scaling Government Operations with Confidence and Compliance
By implementing Process Street across HR, operations, compliance, and project management functions, Fairwinds Technologies transformed from a reactive organization drowning in spreadsheets to a proactive operation where automated workflows handle routine coordination, compliance tracking runs on autopilot, and audit preparation takes days instead of months.
The platform’s intuitive interface allowed Raye to continuously refine processes as the company’s government contracting work grew more sophisticated, while scheduled workflows and automated task assignments freed the small team to focus on strategic growth rather than administrative coordination.
For government contractors navigating complex compliance requirements while scaling operations, Process Street provided the operational backbone that turned firefighting into strategic execution.
Efficiency protects compliance.
Build a reliable foundation to scale government operations with Process Street.
Note: Our solution is powered by AWS and uses these AWS services: Amazon Bedrock, Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, WAF, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, EC2 and ElastiCache for Redis. Process Street serves as the intelligent orchestration layer, where AWS AI services power the advanced reasoning and data processing that turns policies into workflows, and then enables workflow automations, intelligent document processing, and reasoning. Specifically, ProcessStreet’s GenAI capabilities are used to ensure that customers’ policies align with their workflows and that change governance mechanisms control how tasks are updated to achieve compliance in an automated manner. This creates a closed-loop system where AI directly triggers and guides actionable workflows.
The post How Fairwinds Technologies Transformed Government Contracting Ops with Automated Workflows first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
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