The Project

Our customer, a UK based IT reseller with a number of European locations, provides IT solutions and hardware for a number of large well-known corporates in Europe, initially engaged us to assist them with the definition and documentation of their business processes. Strategically, they were trying to improve their business processes to make the most efficient use of resources, whilst tactically preparing the business to move to a new system within 3 years that would require them to adapt their current processes, whilst adopting new ones.

The main challenges were that a number of critical business processes were very manual, but also time critical, which meant that keeping up with customer demands required deploying more and more people to process orders in their existing ERP, which lacked the capability to automate the process whilst maintaining the required levels of business controls, which was vital in maintaining customer satisfaction and protecting the integrity of the business. These challenges would be addressed in the new system, but they required an interim solution that would provide them with the level of automation and integration they needed over the next 3 years before the new system would be implemented.

The Process

Having identified the business processes the customer wanted to automate, we conducted a series of workshops to determine what the functional requirements would be. We then had to work with the system integrator and external developers to produce a full functional specification and design.

The workshops had identified that there was clearly a requirement for flexibility and extensibility in the design, so we proposed that the solution would be hub based, with the ability to further write plug modules in which could be developed as business requirements dictated. We also stipulated that whilst the solution may only need to be used until the new ERP solution would supersede it in 2020, it would be good business practice to develop it so that it could continue to be developed and maintained well beyond that date in case business requirements changed, or unforeseen challenges presented themselves during the upgrade project.

Once the functional specification was accepted, we worked with the system integrator and development team to produce the initial solution, which was completed inside 4 months, with testing and further development taking this up to 6 months.

The solution was then deployed in stages over the next 8 weeks and the benefits of the new process automation were realised immediately, a clear example being that prior to implementation it would take 4 people up to a business day to place 200 orders on the system, have them checked and released for fulfilment, whereas with the automation this could be done by 2 people in less than 2 hours.

Following on from this successful phase of the project, the solution was also used to automate a number of finance processes, and integration with the customer’s e-commerce solution (this is the subject of a separate case study).