Project Initiation Workflow System

Business challenge

The client was one of the biggest industrial companies, which required a system that would streamline the workflow process surrounding the requests and approvals for project or other spending that is not within the typical budgetary/expense cycles. Equipment, irregular expenses, and innovative projects might have funding approved through this process. That process consisted of the routing of a Request for Authorization through appropriate localized, business unit/business unit group, and corporate approvers and reviewers.

That Request for Authorization routing had been handled via hard copy mails and inter-office routing, as well as the emailing of attachment documents to appropriate approvers and reviewers. The duration of approvals along with the ability to track current and historical approvals were not optimal, to say the least. Financial and other reporting at the corporate level was difficult to obtain, and incomplete. It was also difficult to maintain standardized forms and formats, making the administration of the capital expenditure approval process extremely difficult.

Solution

An intranet application was developed to automate the workflow described above. The new system allowed to flexibly setup workflow cycles of any complexity level combining serial and parallel approval/routing patterns. Some of the enhanced capabilities included a full history/audit trail of the routings, faster routing by leveraging email notifications, and better versioning and control of routings due to the common repository of information represented by the central application database. The reviewers at any level could modify data fields that they had access to, approve or deny the request specifying the reason. Since the system operated financial documents, the strong role-based security model had been implemented. The authors of the requests were given the flexibility to adjust the format of request document to meet the specific needs of every project type they were submitting. To allow using the system by all the divisions located in a number of countries worldwide, the multilingual and multicurrency support had been implemented as well. The reporting capabilities gave the ability to review status and position in the workflow of all pending requests.

Software and servers: ASP/VB, Oracle 8.1.7, MS IIS 5.0

Benefits

The application had far exceeded the client management's expectations. The goals of increasing routing speed and efficiency, decreasing the number of errors and associated losses were all achieved. The process of authorization was naturally improved and standardized after the application's deployment, something that had not been actually planned, but has always been proudly named "Business Process Reengineering" in consulting agencies. Oracle was selected as DBMS of choice because the system had to be integrated with corporate Oracle ERP system. The N-tier architecture supported cost effective maintenance and enhancing, and allowed Load Balanced environment support, which was one of key requirement for a system to be used across all business units worldwide.