Metro Pacific reduces reimbursement processes from weeks to days

Challenge: A slow and laborious process

As an infrastructure investment holding company with extensive water, power, toll roads, and healthcare services projects, process efficiency and compliance are of utmost importance to Metro Pacific Investments Corporation (MPIC). However, the company’s reimbursement and expense management processes were paper based, manually completed, labor intensive and impeding finance and accounting operations. There were even occasions of misplaced or duplicate applications, leading to slow turnaround time.

“The amount of time required to manually route our reimbursement and expense applications is just too high and erroneous. We needed a solution that sets appropriate controls to solve this matter”, states Edison R. Mateo, IT Manager, MPIC. MPIC also needed a solution that would integrate seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint and InfoPath, allowing an all-in-one system to render forms that are tied to Nintex K2 Five workflows, making it accessible to all MPIC staff wherever they are, as long as Internet access is available.

Solution: Automated expense and reimbursement processes

For expense/reimbursement requests, any MPIC staff member is now able to submit company-related expenses and reimbursements to Finance and Accounting for approval, which were previously done manually with paper, slowing the process and adding to the company clutter. Requests are now managed and approved using a queue number system regardless of company hierarchy to ensure impartiality. The solution’s escalation rule enables the expense and reimbursement requests to be tracked with automatic reminders to ensure SLAs are met.

“The results, after implementing Nintex K2 Five, have been exceptional,” says Edison. “We have managed to reduce turnaround time of our expense/ reimbursement process from the usual 1 – 2 weeks, down to 3 – 5 days. This was primarily due to the elimination of manual routing, ease of access to the system, and proper tracking of every workflow application in Nintex K2 Five.”

Elimination of paper-based processes also meant that applications are hardly duplicated or redundant. Should there be rare instances of duplicate applications, the solution ensures that these can be recalled with appropriate notifications to the staff tasked with that particular approval.

Challenge: Lack of workflow for audits

Due to the stringent requirements of 3rd party audit firms, MPIC was also in need of a solution that enables instant review and retrieval of contracts. Newly signed contracts did not have a proper workflow for the legal department’s review and retrieving these contracts for update or audit purposes were a chore.

Solution: Clear case management

To address the need for a faster turnaround process, a portal was set up to manage both newly signed and old contracts. Using Nintex K2 Five, a workflow was developed for the Legal Department to review contracts thoroughly before releasing them into the portal, thereby securing control and assurance. It also provides immediate access to contracts that were difficult and time-consuming to obtain in the past, further providing compliance regulated by audit firms.

Having a solution that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint and InfoPath also allows an all-in-one system for MPIC to render forms that are tied to workflows, making it accessible to all MPIC staff wherever they are, as long as Internet access is available.  Moving forward, plans are already put in place to develop more Nintex K2 Five business application projects – including an employee leave application system. As an SAP user, MPIC is also exploring the possibility of connecting K2 Software applications to SAP (in addition to SharePoint) for greater efficiency and collaboration.