CORE Molding Technologies is a leading manufacturer of molded plastics and composite materials. The company maintains high-quality standards across 1.5 million square feet of manufacturing, warehouse, and office space at its seven locations across North America.
To streamline workflows across the organization and its departments, CORE Molding needed a solution that could automate its often complex workflows. The company is no stranger to Nintex and its solutions, having worked with Nintex365 and Nintex DocGen and integrating Nintex into its SharePoint application for years before 2024.
However, after initially wanting to consolidate its systems using Microsoft Power Automate last year, CORE Molding quickly found the organization needed to leverage a more robust solution to achieve more efficient workflows and found that within Nintex Automation CE.
Rahul Bansal, director of business systems at CORE, manages the key applications for the business and its users. One of the most important applications has become the Nintex Workflow, which has allowed CORE to reduce its instance failure rate to ensure smoother, more effective automated workflows.Identifying workflow automation priorities
Bansal carefully selects and manages CORE’s workflow tools and engines to ensure they support his team’s top three priorities:
- Consistency: CORE relies on consistent business processes to ensure its locations run smoothly in the US, Canada, and Mexico. That means they must document task ownership, model processes effectively, and communicate them clearly to employees across the organization.
- Integration: The company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool is its technological backbone, so it must integrate with a workflow tool. This allows them to reduce information duplication across platforms.
- User experience: Bansal and his team know the key to tool adoption is meeting users where they are. A seamless user experience (UX) allows users to interact with a workflow tool effortlessly and reduce errors.
Finding a tool that supported these three priorities wasn’t a one-and-done process. The company’s journey to Nintex Automation Cloud involved a detour.
Not all workflow automation tools are created equal
For a decade, CORE used SharePoint Premium 2008 and 2010, limiting its options for workflow tool integrations. Once they switched from SharePoint to Microsoft 365, those options opened up. At the time, the team felt it made sense to use Microsoft Power Automate, which was included in their subscription.
But Bansal and his team quickly recognized Microsoft Power Automate’s limitations. While some teams point out the platform’s hidden connection charges, less-than-intuitive user interface, and user-specific (instead of company-focused) workflows, CORE homed in on another issue.
Their main problem with Power Automate was that a workflow could only run for 30 days. This was untenable as it disrupted business operations across functions. For example, processes with customized form development, lengthy approvals, and numerous stakeholders might run for a minimum of six weeks or longer.
“Many business processes cannot be accommodated with a 30-day limitation, meaning they last over 30 days and must not just end abruptly within Power Automate’s 30-day timeframe. This disrupts critical processes across the organization.” — Rahul Bansal, Director of Business Systems at CORE Molding Technologies.
Getting a major boost with Nintex Automation CE
After six months of using Microsoft Power Automate, the CORE team recognized they needed a stronger solution to ensure that workflows worked seamlessly across the company’s complex functions beyond a 30-day limitation.
For this, CORE turned to Nintex. For years, they had relied on Nintex 365 and DocGen to create workflows and forms. And they were pleased with the support they’d received from the Nintex experts at Boost Strategy Partners (now part of AIGS).
CORE told Boost that they wanted to switch to Nintex Automation Cloud to automate the workflows that needed to be extended beyond 30 days. Shortly after that, Boost’s founder and CEO Rob Hustick and his team assisted them in migrating to Nintex Automation.
“Since Boost introduced us, we have certainly engaged more actively with Nintex,” says Bansal. “Thanks to Boost, Nintex has been a good tool to work with throughout the migration process. It was smooth, and if we encountered any challenges during the migration process, Nintex had a solution for them.”
Now with Nintex Automation, CORE no longer has to deal with workflow time constraints, which allows them to facilitate lengthier, more complex processes:
- Purchase order request process: When operations or another department wants to buy something, their team members submit a request. This request goes through an automated approval process before the purchase order is created in the ERP system.
- Chargeback application process: When a customer returns a product for any reason, they may withhold payment. A chargeback application workflow allows CORE’s finance and operations teams to document all the activities involved in resolving the customer’s dispute, which may significantly delay the process.
- Pricing approval process: This involves the company’s finance and sales teams making changes to a product price CORE may quote to a customer. Before it’s finalized, that change has to go through several different approval steps.
“The customer service is an important aspect of keeping Nintex and the Automation Cloud—from a support, coaching, and development standpoint.”
— Rahul Bansal, Director of Business Systems at CORE Molding Technologies
Cutting the instance failure rate
It’s impossible to achieve smooth workflows with a high instance failure rate or frequent interruptions in service.
Due to Power Automate’s 30-day workflow limitation—despite attempts to send notifications to users as deadlines approached—Bansal approximates his team had a 20% instance failure rate. That means that 1 in 5 times, an instance would expire before the workflow was complete, causing process interruptions, delays, and frustration.
Since migrating workflows to Nintex, their instance rate has dropped. Much to their relief, Bansal and his team can now rely on their automations to run smoothly without the extra hassle of creating notifications and without added stress on the process owner.
“Our attempts to mitigate Power Automate’s limitations by inserting reminders and notifications to the user like, ‘Hey, this instance is about to expire. Do something with it,’ didn’t always work. So, instance failure rate was the metric that we wanted to change. With Nintex, the 20% failure rate we experienced in Power Automate dropped significantly.” – Rahul Bansal, Director of Business Systems at CORE Molding Technologies
In the future, CORE Molding Technologies sees its team using Nintex Workflow to help visualize flows and integrate data source applications. Thanks to the software’s user-friendly interface, the company also hopes to see continued increases in user adoption.
