A procurement team general manager had committed to the rest of the organisation that any new contract number request would be fulfilled within 30 minutes. The procurement team had recently gone through a restructure and did not have the FTE to meet this commitment. An assessment was done, and it was determined that process automation could be used to achieve this commitment. 

The Business Unit 

The procurement division had recently gone through a restructuring, significantly reducing the amount of FTE. There were considerable backlogs of requests for multiple processes and were not meeting defined SLA’s. 

The Challenges 

The business unit was unable to provide extended time for a subject matter expert due to demand from across the organisation. The process was not defined to a suitable level for process automation, and requests had a large number of variance and errors due to poorly defined excel templates. 

As part of the initial assessment for the current as-is process, it was identified that the excel template that was used for new requests was not suitable. Based on this, we broke the project into two different solution streams to deliver the outcome for the business unit as defined below. 

• Create a new workflow in ServiceNow to capture & fulfil requests from individuals across the organisation.
• Create a digital worker to receive the requests from ServiceNow and perform the process in Oracle to create a new contract number, then update the request in ServiceNow which will complete the fulfilment of the request. 

The project also defined new business rules that were implemented into request form in ServiceNow along with a process flow to ensure efficient fulfilment of requests. 

The Results 

The project successfully delivered an integrated solution with ServiceNow and a digital worker to automate the end-to-end process of new contract number generation. Requests were now automated end-to-end removing the need for a human worker to intervene in the process, significantly improving process efficiency, reporting and customer satisfaction.  

The average time for fulfilment of requests was reduced to 10 minutes, well within the 30-minute commitment made by the general manager. Data accuracy and customer satisfaction also significantly increased through the use of ServiceNow and digital workers, replacing Excel and e-mail. 

Summary 

Overall this workflow automation project delivered significant business benefits and significantly increased the internal customer satisfaction for Procurement. The project also highlighted the benefits of using a workflow system in conjunction with digital workers to get a better outcome overall for the organization instead of just automating the as-is process.