Elly Yates-Roberts |
Seeking growth is an essential part of achieving business success, but when iNova Pharmaceuticals wanted to continue expanding its brands and reach, it needed a more effective way to handle business processes.
Working in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, and with a range of products, the business needed innovation in multiple areas to achieve expansion. One such area was automating business processes for scale and agility while freeing up staff for other activities.
After considering several workflow solutions, iNova decided to use Nintex for its intuitive interface, high functionality and potential to add value to the company’s processes, according to Sam Cumming, senior project manager at iNova.
Working with Nintex partner Antares, the collaboration first addressed a new way to onboard vendors, replacing a decentralised process based on emails and SharePoint folders. “We would have to chase down people for approvals and documentation,” said Cumming. “The work was always completed, but significant time was wasted on manually intensive processes. Our technology team needed to support a growing business with the same resources. Nintex was crucial.”
The new vendor request workflow uses Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex Forms. An iNova employee completes a form that provides information about the vendor, which is then passed onto various reviewers in relevant departments.
Where previously managers would often need to search through scores of emails or documents to keep the approval process on track, the new process ensures that managers are always aware of the status of the workflow. This has sped up the onboarding process by approximately 30 per cent.
As well as faster processes, Nintex has also enabled iNova to deliver more consistent governance. Using the process automation solution, legal teams are automatically notified of all new vendors and can address legal documentation requirements at an early stage.
As word spread about the success of the vendor onboarding workflow, executives from elsewhere in the company also wanted to use Nintex. This led to a new recruitment workflow for human resources, a third-party due diligence workflow for the legal department and capitalisation workflow for the finance department.
“We currently have 10 Nintex-based workflows in place and the technology team have a backlog of 10 more to develop,” said Cumming. “These workflows are helping our business by standardising and automating our processes, increasing accuracy, and enabling tracking and accountability. The longer our business uses Nintex workflows, the more business-critical they become in helping us to achieve our goals.”
This article was originally published in the Summer 2021 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.