A US-headquartered multinational manufacturer and marketer of home appliances, client strongly believes in innovation being a critical element to bringing ideas to life and designing and producing products that caters to the needs of consumers throughout the world.
The client focuses on delivering purposeful innovations through their diverse catalogue of home appliances that simplifies the lives of consumers. Also, the company is playing a vital role in producing high performing, lower impact technologies to help consumers reduce their own environmental footprint.
Obsolete technologies made Capital Appropriation Request submission and reviewing a cumbersome process.
Capital Appropriation Requests raised by employees deeply impacts an organization’s spending and budgeting processes. Tracking requests, required approvals, and status of requests can be some daunting tasks for the management. The client depended on obsolete technologies to track approval processes. Along with that, client recognized an urgently emerging need to improve the workflow associated with Electronic Capital Appropriation Requests. The legacy system ran on internal server, had poor workflow to submit or respond to a request, which made the process cumbersome with reluctant user adoption. The organization wanted a technology that could :
- Completely replace the existing system with a more flexible, easy to use, and configurable solution
- Centralize and streamline the Electronic Capital Appropriation Request with an easy to understand and manage, robust approval matrix
- Enable enhanced performance and reporting capability
The system earlier used by the client was not mobile and could only be accessed within the internal office network, hence prolonged the process making it opaque and inefficient. The system struggled to efficiently report dedicated yearly budgets versus actual expenditures.
The client was focused on simplifying their approval workflows with an eye on automating the entire process to efficiently track requests and yearly budgets through smart reporting. To enhance their requests processing and reporting capabilities, Persistent advised the client to switch their platform to Google Cloud Platform.
Persistent and Google Cloud Platform helps deliver a more efficient, comprehensive, automated Capital Appropriation Request system
We evaluated several alternatives to address the company’s Capital Appropriation Requests processing needs. Ultimately, they decided to re-engineer the platform to architect a robust request submission and processing, and report generating platform on the best-in-class Google’s infrastructure. The solution has now automated the workflow for submission and tracking of Capital Appropriation Requests required for seeking approval to spend capital at the client’s organization. This ensures alignment between investment choices and overall enterprise strategy of the organization and facilitates future audits of performance against business commitments.
We helped the client enable an automated approval process that specifies approval requirements according to business rules and disallows improper approval attempts. By automating it within a single system, there is now a streamlined, cohesive process that the client anticipated would reduce approval times from months to days. The solution has been helping the client :
- Streamline and standardize processes across multiple divisions: The solution has managed to identify a clear, standardized process to submit as well as review a request. The solution helps requesters and approvers follow a set practice while submitting or reviewing a request. With easy usability and configurable workflows, the platform is proactively used by the employees from Asia, EMEA, and LATAM regions.
- Establish clear approval matrix: The solution can support up to ten levels in an approval matrix. The solution helps determine the chain of approvers for different types of Capital Appropriation Requests depending on their location, division and requested capital. In addition to this, the approval routing matrix also maintains a list of users / departments who are informed through automated emails and reminders as the submitted request traverse through the workflow.
- Submit, review and approve/manage requests from any mobile device: With application operational on Google app engine, the secure single sign-on feature helps users to quickly access the information anytime, anywhere through web and mobile.
- Implement strong reporting capability: The report presenting a list of Capital Appropriation Requests provides filtering criteria including range of request numbers, creation date range, requested by, Locations, Divisions and CAR Status.
The solution has already fueled easy collaboration over submitting, reviewing, and responding to Capital Appropriation Requests submitted by various departments of the company. The platform has helped the client simplify approval matrix to expedite the processes from step one till the last. The solution enables employees to correctly submit requests without missing out on any critical steps, so that decisions based on capital allocation happen in a timelier fashion with 100% transparency.
