The brainchild of the late David Rockefeller and others back in 1964, the International Executive Service Corps brings together the best of the U.S. public and private sectors to spur economic development in developing countries worldwide. The IESC’s works covers trade and enterprise, information communication and applied technologies, financial services, tourism, public sector, and business enablement. The organization isn’t huge—it has just 100 employees—but its impact is. The IESC has completed more than 25,000 projects in 130 countries. A USDA-funded project in the Dominican Republic, for example, helps farmers to boost eggplant yield—and revenue—by replacing pesticides with marigolds and sunflowers that foster natural pest management.
With its can-do pedigree, the IESC is always looking for ways to make its operations not just more effective, but also more efficient. After all, government contracts and grants fund much of its work, and the compliance and accountability requirements attached to those resources are more stringent than the requirements many private corporations face.
That’s part of the reason the IESC migrated from an on-premises Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft Office 365 back in 2014. IESC gained a modern, cloud-based environment that was accessible to staff and volunteers worldwide, that supported mobile devices, and that helped get the organization out of the business of maintaining hardware.
Things didn’t go entirely as planned
The IESC used out-of-the-box SharePoint for forms and workflows, but staff and volunteers found them challenging to use. Uptake was low. Users choosing email workarounds to avoid the workflows created the very audit risk that IESC wanted to avoid.
IESC needed a better workflow solution. It looked at other options including Infowise Ultimate Forms — and chose Nintex Workflow for Office 365.
“We wanted a solution that integrated fully with Office 365 that we already had, offered a highly intuitive interface, and that was already in widespread use,” says John Troup, Information Services Manager at IESC. “That’s Nintex for Office 365. It’s really an industry standard. Consultants recommended it. IT managers in our professional association recommended it.”
Easy, effective wins
Troup and his team adopted Nintex Workflow for Office 365 in 2015, first building a relatively simple workflow for personnel leave requests that immediately reduced the time it takes supervisors to approve those requests. Executives also liked that they could approve requests simply and easily through the Nintex interface on their phones, without needing to go through SharePoint.
Buoyed by this win, IESC went on to create a more complex workflow, for contractor management, that required integration with third-party DocuSign and Taleo contractor database software. “Integration couldn’t have been easier,” says Troup. “Nintex has native integration with DocuSign that eliminated the need for custom work. And Nintex web services were a great way to call Taleo’s REST API. We avoided tremendous time and expense for consultants.”
Productivity is up 350%
Another IESC workflow, for invoice approval, “eliminates a lot of the time and the thought that users formerly put into getting invoices approved,” says Troup. It also eliminates the physical labor of invoice approval, such as tracking down supervisors in hallways for their signatures. The Nintex-based workflow checks the submitter’s profile to see if he or she is authorized to approval the invoice directly, in which case it goes directly to Accounting for processing. Otherwise, the workflow uses email notifications and an at-a-glance dashboard to route invoices automatically.
The results of the invoice approval workflow are impressive. Productivity is way up, with IESC processing 350% as many invoices as it could before the use of Nintex Workflow. And the time to approve an invoice is down 80% from 7 days to 1.5 days or less.
Troup appreciates the difference that IESC has made with Nintex Workflow. “When I was on a projects team, a lot of my day was spent figuring out where invoices and travel requests were [in the approval process] and marking them in my own Excel trackers,” he says. “We’ve eliminated all that with Nintex Workflow. We don’t waste time exchanging emails or tracking things manually. Uptake of Office 365 is up, which means staff and volunteers like it.”
Boosts Office 365 active use
Since IESC adopted Nintex Workflow and made workflows accessible through its SharePoint-based procurement center, visits to the procurement center are up 10X. That’s an example of increased active use for Office 365.
The same features that enable IESC staff to track workflow automatically also enable the organization to meet compliance and accountability requirements. “Everything goes through Nintex Workflow and the solution provides a complete record of workflow history,” says Troup. “We use Nintex Workflow to take the risk out of audits.”
Reduces risk, potential penalties
That risk would otherwise be considerable. “If we can’t show how funds are being used and monitored, we could lose future funding sources,” Troup says. “We could be subject to major fines. It could put the financial stability of the organization at risk. Nintex mitigates that risk for us.”Looking ahead, Troup sees Nintex Mobile at the heart of a projected set of scalable apps for IESC’s international offices. And that’s just one future use. “The more time I spend on the Nintex platform, the more I get out of it, the more I find features I can use to make our staff more productive and our organization more effective.”
