Australian agency achieves 6X increase in workflow flexibility

Streamlined procurement workflows accelerate processes by 20% while reducing costs by 35%

If you think that automating workflow is enough to optimize the costs of business processes and gain visibility into those processes, think again. Or ask Paul Atkins. Atkins is Director of Procurement and Contracts for Perth, Australia’s Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority, which oversees hundreds of active contracts worth about AU$500 million a year.

Getting MRA authorized staff to approve a contract can take up to 100 steps, depending on the contract’s size and complexity. Atkins and his staff need to know where each contract sits in the workflow at any given time, so they can address bottlenecks and keep the process humming. They also need the agility to implement workflow changes quickly and cost effectively, to meet new requirements and mitigate new risks.

In 2013, MRA automated its contract approval workflow with Microsoft SharePoint, replacing an Access database.

“We’re a small team in Procurement and Contracts,” says Atkins. “Making changes to workflows was a time-consuming and fraught task. Email notifications weren’t as intuitive and successful as we needed. Maintaining workflow history for auditors was difficult. And we still lacked visibility into the process.”