Citizen developers help automate manual processes that return costs and hours across the business.
Supplying heavy machinery to the construction and resource industries has been Sime Darby Industrial’s focus for over 90 years. Already a high-growth organization formed out of organic growth and acquisition, a new management team at Sime Darby Industrial undertook a review to determine how best to support the core pillars of the operation – customers, employees, and e-commerce. After the review, an organization-wide digital transformation initiative was put in place to support these pillars into the future.
Underpinning the move to digitization was the need to be able to scale rapidly in a fast-moving environment, which meant that a move away from solely in-house development was required and automation was given its own part of the digital transformation program to deliver. As part of the digital transformation initiative, a decision was made to consolidate the multiple different form solutions being used to capture and input data to help reduce tech debt.
Delivering measurable results back to the business
One of the ways that success is measured at Sime Darby Industrial is by returned hours and value to the business – where ROI impact is calculated. Each project incorporates a business analysis component, which allows for both hard and soft benefits to be captured at the outset of a project. Measurable benefits differ between projects but include metrics like cost per transaction, number of form submissions, and the cost associated with each submission. All process data is captured for every project and outputs can be viewed visually via dashboards. Throughout FY22 and part of FY23, projects delivered using Nintex returned 6,000 hours and over $900,000 to the business. Using Nintex, Sime Darby Industrial has automated multiple manual processes enabling forms to be completed online, processed, and approved using workflow, including:
- Purchase Order (PO) approvals – the digitization of PO processing delivered one of the largest impacts on the business. Approvals are now fully integrated with the ERP system. This has removed some of the challenges being experienced by approvers not knowing when a PO approval was required, as well as having to be on a network to be able to provide approval. Now, once a PO has been created in the ERP system, a component workflow creates a task that is emailed via a mobile device for approval.
- IT Onboarding – requests for new users or new equipment, integration to create accounts, tickets, and the provision of access to systems.
- Leave applications – a temporary solution to allow employees to submit leave applications using mobile phones. This process has now been transitioned over to an HR platform.
