Improving control over the purchase order process

Challenge: A time-consuming process to adapt

For many years, Cimex Invest had been using an automated workflow for requesting and approving purchase orders. A pivotal business process, this purchase order approvals workflow was used by around 100 employees throughout the business to buy anything from large enterprise IT systems to packets of pencils. The company wanted to upgrade the entire process to give managers greater overview of all purchase orders requested and raised, so that they could better monitor and control business expenditure.

At the same time, the IT department wanted to have greater flexibility to adapt and expand the purchase order approvals process, on demand, to meet changing business requirements. The existing process had been created with a competitor’s technology, but the solution could only integrate with Microsoft SharePoint, which limited Cimex Invest’s ability to deliver process improvements. The IT team needed to write thousands of lines of bespoke code to get the process to interact with other data sources and this made the whole process time-consuming to adapt and slow to use.

When Cimex discovered Nintex K2 Cloud, the company was impressed by how easily they could connect with a wide number of data sources, including Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and SAP Sybase databases and web services. Nintex K2 Cloud also provided a lot more flexibility in how processes could be designed and the use of digital SmartForms. “We saw huge possibilities with K2 Software,” says Pavel Jenč, IT Applications Manager, at Cimex Invest.

Solution: More control, efficiency, and accuracy

In just twelve weeks, Cimex Invest migrated its existing purchase order approvals process from a competitor’s platform to Nintex K2 Cloud with support from a local partner. The solution integrated with the organization’s other IT systems and existing databases effortlessly, enabling the IT team to recreate this core business process very quickly.

Since then, the IT team has been able to take advantage of the flexibility of the platform to deliver some key improvements to the purchase order approvals process. It has, for example, created an automated form to help employees identify the correct person to approve purchase orders. Before the new solution, the IT couldn’t make quick changes to the purchase order approvals process due to complexity or unsupported integrations. Now, however, the team has a more versatile platform that it can use to easily adapt the process and develop enhancements as needed. “Using [Nintex] K2 Cloud, we can deliver the process improvements the business needs and we can also respond very quickly,” Jenč says.

Critically, the new purchase order approvals process is now helping Cimex Invest to better monitor and control expenditure across the entire company. Managers of cost centers can easily monitor the volume of requests in real time and ensure expenditure is in line with profitability. The new process also helps to improve invoicing accuracy. Information is automatically transferred directly into the company’s accounting system and included in invoices without any manual input, reducing the chance of human error.

End users now save time as requests to purchase items can be created in as little as 10 seconds rather than several minutes, a noteworthy time saving for a business that processes more than 2000 purchase order requests each year.

Cimex Invest is now planning further enhancements to the process to introduce new functionality for verifying that goods and services received correspond with purchase orders. A second planned process extension will introduce new functionality for generating, approving and archiving contracts.