Summary
Actis, a leading private equity investor in emerging markets with over US $3.3 billion under management, approached Mekon to implement a workflow system to aid their back office business processes. Actis specialises in the African, Chinese and South and East Asian markets and has a total of 16 offices worldwide.
Actis was undertaking a project to move back office functions from London to a new Shared Service Centre in Delhi, India.
Key Issues
As part of this initiative Actis wanted to settle expense claims and invoices centrally, rather than locally. This meant that some supporting functions had to be moved from overseas offices to the Shared Service Centre and that a number of existing processes needed to be redefined. Mekon implemented Adobe LiveCycle Workflow and Forms to support this change and to resolve the following key issues:
- Several processes needed streamlining
- Reduce error rates
- Needed more traceability and visibility of information flows
- Actis needed to be able to acurately measure service levels
Solution Description
Mekon helped Actis identify their current business processes and translate these to process maps. Once done, PDF forms were created which allowed them to submit their forms for approval.
The process catered for multiple approvers and automatically escalated tasks if they were not completed within a given time. Decision points in the process can be designed based on the invoice amounts and can be easily converted to US Dollars (or any currency) based on real time currency rates.
Users receive email notification of new tasks and can open the PDF form direct from the email. All form data is stored in XML and can be easily extracted in order to import to any interfacing systems such as accounting, purchasing, stock control, etc.
Features/Benefits
- Standardised business processes that all offices use
- Visible audit trails
- Reduced manual input of information
- Easy to complete PDF forms
