Business Problem

Many companies today still use paper-based requisitions to initiate and route procurement requests.  Even those companies that have developed an electronic process still require manual intervention for completing the process. Typically, paper-based or electronic-based forms are routed to people not required to be involved in the process or are not the right person to approve the changes. Long review and approval times for these requests are common and people often spend much of their day tracking down where the requisition is in the approval process.

Another issue is that the forms associated with the process are often full of errors, incomplete information or require users to enter information not pertinent to the process.

Additionally, tools to support the selection and accreditation of suppliers are not established to dynamically support the different levels of supplier evaluation. For example, a supplier providing office supplies requires a different certification process than a supplier providing a critical component that affects product safety. Creating a process to support supplier accreditation by dynamically adjusting the questions, required information, and ultimately the routing for approvals substantially streamlines the process while reducing the likelihood for errors.

 

Active Wizard Solution

The Active Wizard provides the tools required to develop a custom series of Procurement Processes without resorting to programming. The wizard driven interface captures required form data (via ActiveForm) and then utilizes that data to dynamically generate the form(s) and the exact route for approval (via ActiveWorkflow). Impacted documents such as product specifications can also be selected from the document repository and routed with the change.

 

Business Impact

• Signature reduction
• No more incomplete or error-prone forms
• Reduction in turn-around time of procurement requests
• Reduced risks in supplier evaluations