70% of business processes transformed

Solution: Automated monitoring and approvals

Using Nintex K2 Five significantly improved visibility into expenditures, materials, and assets throughout the company, enabling Bidvest SACD to improve its financial management. For example, the company has halved the amount of capital locked up in inventory by using Nintex K2 Five to monitor store inventory more accurately. Unnecessary stock holdings have been reduced and replacement materials are only ordered when actually needed.

The company has also made substantial cost savings to better manage its expenditure. Using Nintex K2 Five processes, the company ensures all expenditures are authorized in terms of the company purchasing authority matrix and everyone follows the same standardized processes. Nintex K2 Five also collates data on expenditure across the whole company, enabling it to negotiate better pricing from its suppliers.

Solution: On-demand access

Using Nintex K2 Five created considerable time savings by making information more accessible on demand. For example, it used to take a week for a financial team of two people to complete a stock analysis of refrigerated container parts and value that stock, taking into account currency fluctuations. “Now this takes just two minutes using K2 Software,” says Mayer. “At a press of a button, it’s all done.”

Further time savings have been achieved by the financial team in the production of monthly accounts. The K2 Software solution now provides accurate, up-to-date information and eliminates manual processes, so employees can produce month-end accounts on the first working day of the new month. In total, Mayer estimates that two or three people in the finance team each save 8 to 10 days a month with K2 Software.

Solution: Paperless, efficient business

Managers at Bidvest SACD now rely on Nintex K2 Five to help them make better-informed decisions. One of the company’s Nintex K2 Five solutions is an operational cost model that pulls information from stores, purchase orders and workshops. At any point in time, managers can see the actual cost per hour of any machine running in any region. They can then identify the machines with the highest operating costs and decide which machines to replace first. “Because K2 Software links into everything, all the information we need about any part of our business is available,” Mayer explains. “We can make informed business decisions based on real statistics.”

Nintex K2 Five has played a pivotal role in achieving a paperless, efficient business. Bidvest SACD reduced its use of paper by 60% in just one year, and the company’s most paper-intensive processes are now fully automated. For instance, every single purchase order in the business is now raised and approved using Nintex K2 Five—that’s 390,000 purchase orders in four years.

Solution: Agile, powerful software

Nintex K2 Five gives Bidvest SACD the ability to develop new Nintex K2 Five workflows or systems in an agile way to meet the needs of the business. The company created all its K2 Software process in-house, following some initial support from the company, to set up development, testing, and production environments. “It shows you the power of [Nintex] K2 Five when you can develop automated processes with very little software development knowledge,” Mayer says. “It’s almost unbelievable how quickly you can develop new [Nintex] K2 Five solutions.”