Quaker Houghton’s business is to make other businesses run better by optimizing their processes, reducing their costs, and advancing their safety and sustainability around the fluids they use to make, roll, cut, or cast metals. The manufacturing processes for which its customers use Quaker Houghton’s fluids are precise and sophisticated. If anything’s just a bit off, it can show up on the customer’s shop floor in the form of chemical deposits on a machine, foam in a central system, or defects on steel or aluminum sheets.
The first step in resolving these issues to the customer’s satisfaction is getting the right samples and information to the right lab—Quaker Houghton has nearly 20 of them around the world—to conduct experiments and analyses. But it could take a flurry of emails within the company to determine where any particular request should be directed, and the efficiency of email-driven processes are notoriously uneven. The existing process required additional time of lab managers to locate and organize data in order to fully understand the overall demand.
Quaker Houghton wanted a workflow solution to address these needs and considered its options. Some familiar tools it might have used were no longer supported, others were too expensive. Quaker Houghton chose Nintex.
Empowering the end users
The company’s solution for lab requests and reporting—formally called the “online tool for non-routine service requests”—uses Nintex Forms and Nintex Workflow. Customer-facing sales and service personnel access the lab request form from an online portal, and complete fields and drop-downs with details on the fluid type, how the customer uses it, and the resulting defect.
Calculations behind the Nintex Form then identify the lab to which the service rep should direct the request and send samples for analysis—completely resolving the old problem of a service rep not knowing which lab to send the request to. Nintex Workflow routes the request to appropriate reviewers and approvers, keeping them in the loop. When the lab completes its analysis, the resulting report is sent to all relevant parties and archived in SharePoint for easy access whenever needed, eliminating the need to make time-consuming requests for additional copies.
After successfully testing the solution in its EMEA region, Quaker Houghton has rolled out the solution globally to hundreds of sales and service personnel. The solution has eliminated the time-consuming back and forth of emails between the service reps and the labs, so customers get faster turnarounds on their requests. In the last 12 months, the solution saved the EMEA-based labs about 200 hours in administrative time.
