The Problem
A global manufacturing company faced a significant process challenge with its purchase orders (PO). Previous attempts by multiple vendors had failed to solve the visibility problem of the end-to-end PO process. ProcessMaker's process intelligence platform was able to successfully tackle this ultimate challenge and lead the game thanks to its agility, speed of execution, and innovative approach. The case company is a global manufacturing enterprise that operates in almost 100 countries and serves customers with solutions mainly in the infrastructure, utility, and industry sectors. Their primary objective was to streamline the PO creation process which could potentially lead to higher process efficiency and cost savings. The manufacturer’s main challenge was to get full visibility over the PO creation process across different regions and geographies that use different versions of SAP. Inaccuracies with supplier master data were causing issues with process execution and creating a lot of variances, but they couldn’t quantify it or find the root causes. Achieving a holistic view of the PO creation process would identify bottlenecks in the current process and discover improvement opportunities. The manufacturer knew the problem very well, had well-defined success criteria, and knew exactly what it was looking for in a vendor, making the challenge clear but complex. Additional challenges included automatically identifying and visualizing the different paths taken during the PO creation process, comparing and benchmarking between different locations and buyers, and finding the shadow tools used in the PO creation process. A better way to capture and analyze process data at scale was needed.
