BPM for Chemicals

a. Client Business Challenge

An international company specializing in agricultural products and fertilizers research and development wanted to adopt a BPMS to accelerate chemical products’ trials, having the data secured from the first till the final stage of the process, eliminating information loss during the workflow stages.

Initially, the data given for review was stored in unstructured text format and was different among business units. This, most of the times caused missing points and time loss. Information should be centralized, managed effectively and revised during the years as the client’s vision to save earth resources and comply with legislation remains vital.

b. Objectives

Define the steps of trials starting from the submission until the final payment of invoices
Standardize the format of data entered in the system
Monitor the trial process for all business units and countries
Provide flexibility in UI design.
Integrate with the ERP system
Share trial findings with third party systems
Include guest users with limited access to shared trials
Strong security features required to protect critical findings
Adopt a DMS with document encryption
Provide analytics to upper management with financial budget distribution among countries and trial effectiveness
Ability to extract information from gathered data

c. Comidor Solution

Using Comidor’s workflow designer it was secured that only users with specific role could participate in each stage execution, based on specific parameters. Paper/text template was digitalized so that it fits the purpose with low-code custom fields and forms. Users had an active role in the whole UI customization process providing feedback and requesting changes that were implemented using agile methodologies. Business rules were set up by the client’s IT employees, who were able to adapt to the system configuration and management after initial training.

Holding all trial information in a central repository, created a transparent environment where management can refer to older trials, check results and tests performed and finally support decision making and predictability. Tasks and Emails for each workflow stage are automatically generated upon critical process change, reducing time spent on communicating messages to relevant people.

d. Achievements

Trial approval processes were fully automated based on rules
Clients’ IT employees were trained in process design and low-code and were able to maintain the existing processes
Comidor was seamlessly integrated with the ERP System
UI was successfully adapted to users’ requirements
Trial data was standardized and a common acceptable format was adapted by all countries
Intelligent notification system was used to notify users for time critical activities. Missing information on the trial’s progress was easily identified
Business unit managers took advantage of advanced analytics and optimized budget assignment to different crop trials
Guest users and third party programs were able to connect with Comidor’s integration bus
Gathered trial data were used to create a pool of historical information, which will be used on a next step to predict crop growth and fertilizer effectiveness