Requisition processes typically involve many different internal and external participants. Additionally, a requisition may pass through many different systems and forms as it moves from initial submission to delivered product or service — available in a warehouse. Understanding the performance of the complete requisition process, its bottlenecks and inefficiencies is difficult for many organizations.

Since there are many organizational and system gaps in the process, managing exceptions efficiently is also a concern for many procurement organizations. Exceptions between systems and groups are typically handled manually — with few controls and little visibility.

BPM Opportunity

Many organizations first evaluated whether they could extend their ERP or e-procurement applications to improve visibility and exception handling. Their conclusions, however, have been that BPM offers unique capabilities that make it the best choice:

• End-to-end requisition visibility. Provide real-time visibility to resolutions as they move across systems — from procurement to financial to supply chain.
• Orchestrate efficient exception handling. Define processes for key process exceptions that involve the appropriate internal and external parties and use notifications, deadlines and escalations to drive efficient resolution.
• Simplify process participation. Instead of requiring employees and partners to learn complex financial and procurement systems, provide simple interfaces that allow more diverse participants to submit, review and approve purchase orders and requisitions more efficiently.
• Faster deployment. Flexible capabilities for modeling processes, routing exceptions, gathering user input, and monitoring exceptions in different systems make deployment faster and easier to maintain in BPM.
• Leverage existing transactional and imaging systems. Standards-based integration enables reading and posting transactions and documents while introducing more extensible Web-based forms and interfaces.
• Enforce policy compliance. Ensure that payables policies are followed and automatically generate an audit trail of every step in a process.

Lombardi In Action

A global life sciences company has implemented BPM to provide managers and employees with direct visibility to the status of requisitions — across several ERP and SCM systems. They have replaced manual resolution for exceptions with efficient, repeatable processes. Now, when an exception happens anywhere in the process, participants know the exact problem and can view its progress towards resolution. Finally, since the execution information for every step in a process is saved, an audit trail exists that shows the problem and how it was resolved.