How a major industrial group automated its complex purchase order processes

Hundreds of business rules managed in a third-party database dynamically applied at process runtime

A major industrial group with 40,000 employees across 90 countries needed to automate complex purchase order processes. There were hundreds of possible validation routes relating to numerous criteria such as business unit, company, division, allocation code, amount, currency, request type, etc. As well, all business rules were managed manually in an Excel file, with no centralized repository or business rules engine in place. The solution had to meet the following requirements:

The deployment of a business rules engine was not an option for the client due to both the cost and the complexity associated with this type of solution. The IT group preferred to find a solution that would immediately leverage existing routing channels defined in the Excel file, while implementing a solution to facilitate the management of business rules and validation circuits in real time.

The WorkflowGen solution

WorkflowGen was chosen for its proven configurability and reliability over the years in similar large-scale deployments for several other industrial corporations.

Since WorkflowGen natively offers all of the features needed to meet the client’s UI/UX requirements, it took only a few days to build a proof of concept that demonstrated the low-code/no-code approach to quick workflow modelization, as well as the design of the web form that would become the main interface to capture information and perform validations.

In order to keep using the hundreds of business rules stored in the existing Excel file, the solution was to migrate the data to an SQL Server database. Then, depending on the information entered by the users in the web form during the purchase order request, WorkflowGen would query the SQL Server database and dynamically populate the form with the relevant validation steps and associated email notifications.

Additional simple workflows were created in order to capitalize on the WorkflowGen solution through modifying or creating centralized validation circuits in the SQL Server database, which supports purchase order validation processes.

Benefits

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