SharePoint Workflow Application for Processing Payment to Vendors
About This Customer/ Company ObjectiveCustomer is a British-Dutch transnational consumer goods company co-headquartered in London, United Kingdom, and Rotterdam, Netherlands. Its products include food and beverages, cleaning agents, beauty products, and personal care products. It is Europe’s seventh most valuable company.
The Business Problem Challenges
Unilever has several suppliers for its products and goods manufacturing and have vendors across the globe. Vendors use to submit the payment request in form of excel and word document which were cumbersome for approvals, edits and changes. Data security and governance was also a concern along with search and audit of the document were very time consuming and complex.
The Solution
How An Invasystems Company Helped
Invasystems provided an application developed on Microsoft SharePoint Platform using its modern features which is currently live in 63 countries for processing payment requests made employees/ business units personnel. Once an employee files a payment request, it goes through a 7-level approval process starting from the employee’s immediate manager. The rest of the approvers are selected from an approval matrix where the approvers could be changed by the administrative group at run time. All the requests which are in approval state (at any level in the SharePoint based workflow) would need to follow the modified approval path. Another lever of complexity was introduced by way of a TOA (Table of Approvers), and Finance Approvals based on the request amount. The final level of approval was done using SAP integration and third-party teams. From the time the request is submitted, till its execution (disbursement), email notifications are triggered to the requestor, and the concerned approvers.
Reminder notifications are also sent at a configurable period. If an approver is not available, he/she can delegate the approval to someone from the list of approvers.
Stakeholders could see different reports which were produced using Microsoft SharePoint OOTB feature as well as customizations. Dashboard reporting was enabled for the users for better user experience and give a holistic overview of the reports.
The Solution
Apart from the regular functional testing, the dynamic nature of the Approval Matrices and email notifications, a vital offering was the performance testing of the application to ensure:
- Ensure that application can store a high value of supporting documents
- Ensure smooth functioning of the workflow and is not blocked at any stageVestibulum et facilisis urna.
- Ensure concurrent requests can be handled by the application.
The Benefits
Benefits For User
- A robust and dynamic application capable of handling the complex approval process, archival, delegation, notifications
- Stable to handle 5000+ requests in a month
- Quick development and deployment using Microsoft SharePoint platform enabled in cost and time saving for the company
