The Arntz Optibelt Group brings products to market up to 5 months faster

Challenge: Manual workflow slowed business

Approving new or modified products had been a lengthy process. Production managers relied on manual printed forms which had to be signed, scanned and sent to the next person in the approval chain.

It was impossible for managers to know the status of the approval process for each item or whether the processes were followed consistently and correctly every time.

The company knew it needed an automated solution to manage approvals while providing managers the visibility they needed to keep production on schedule.

Solution: A more efficient workflow

A pivotal new Nintex K2 Five workflow dramatically reduced the time to market for Optibelt’s products, provided new project visibility and opened up profit streams that had been idling.

There are two major categories of product approvals: new products and modifications of existing products. New product designs previously took 200 days to approve, at a significant cost of employee time and profitability. Nintex K2 Five helped compress that time by 75 percent and allowed production managers to target their approvals to within 50 days.

The process of modifying existing products had previously taken up to 100 days to approve. K2 Software streamlined that workflow to 18 steps and enabled fast, accurate and consistent approvals across all employees and locations. The result is a transformation, accelerating speed-to-market by up to five months. Additionally, managers can easily and instantly access the status of each product review to pinpoint its place is in the pipeline.

Challenge: An end to scanning and emailing forms

Before K2 Software, Optibelt managers used to take 15 minutes to print approvals. They had to sign it, scan and rename it, and then send it on to the next person.

Not only was this time consuming, but the quality of the signatures was also reduced with each time the document was scanned with the18 approvals required. Oftentimes, signatures became impossible to read.

Solution: A clean, modern workflow

What previously took 15 minutes now takes as little as 30 seconds. This 89 percent improvement generated minutes, hours, weeks and ultimately months of newfound efficiency.

On average, Optibelt saves 4.5 hours in each and every approval process, just from eliminating printing and scanning alone. Employees are no longer wasting time on tedious, repetitive tasks and can focus their time on higher-value activities.

Quality control is also enhanced by clearer, more legible signatures. Optibelt’s new digital workstream, built on Nintex K2 Five, is standardized, auditable and clearly shows who gave approval and when.

Additionally, they used K2 Software to build a process to manage the expiration dates for batches of rubber – a tool that is utilized approximately 160 times in a typical 10-week period.