Accelerating and Simplifying 360° Workflow

TL;DR

_ too long; didn’t read _

NeoSystem came to Nutrient Workflow in 2012 with the use cases in the HR department. In the first year, they had 30-40 different workflows in production internally and 7k requests. Since becoming an Nutrient Workflow partner, they have taught and brought on new clients to be a part of the Nutrient Workflow community. NeoSystems continues looking for new ways to employ Nutrient Workflow internally and as a client solution.

Background

An award-winning, tech-enabled professional services firm, NeoSystems is a trusted business partner that provides strategic back office services vital to running successful companies, associations, and organizations in various industries, including government contracting, non‐profits, and other highly regulated business enterprises.

NeoSystems offers scalable solutions with a team of industry experts, best-in-class software applications, and an advanced technical infrastructure that leverages cloud computing. NeoSystems has preconfigured processes known as NeoFlows. NeoFlows are based on years of experience working with Government Contractors and highly regulated businesses to solve complex process needs. 

NewSystems also has custom-built solutions and services tailored to their clients’ needs.

The Challenge

As the company’s client roster grew, many of its employees worked with multiple companies, and the often-used email‐based method of delivering information and confirming receipt was no longer the most efficient or secure way of routing documents and transactions through the approval process. Because the information employees and clients deal with includes proprietary, sensitive financial data, NeoSystems needed to find a process that could ensure the security of the documents moving through its organization and out to its clients, with a continuous eye toward improving efficiencies.

The challenge was finding a solution to ensure the security of the proprietary, sensitive information currently being transferred via email and improve operational efficiency.

Why Nutrient Workflow?

As the Company’s business grew and information security became more of a concern, the CEO at the time, Michael Tinsley, began researching software solutions that would allow NeoSystems to process transactions in a more secure process while also improving process efficiency.

Mr. Tinsley also wanted a solution that would deliver value to the client well beyond addressing security concerns – he wanted a process management solution that was such good clients would choose NeoSystems because they truly depended on that system.

NeoSystems was faced with choosing a workflow management system that would automate critical back-office functions within the company’s internal and back-office operations run on behalf of its clients.

As NeoSystems reviewed the landscape for business process automation tools, Nutrient Workflow was discovered. In 2013, with an evaluation license for the software installed on NeoSystems’ on‐site servers, they began exploring the solution’s capabilities.

“Nutrient Workflow offered the most intuitive design tool amongst all the workflow products we reviewed, as well as provided a graphical view of the process in motion.”

Tinsley stated, “I felt this would allow our process engineers a faster method for designing the workflows and our non‐technical professionals a better mechanism to understand the processes in which they participate. Also, Nutrient Workflow allowed us to host the application within our private cloud to address better the high-security standards embedded in the Federal Information Security Management Act’s regulations.”

The Nutrient Workflow Solution

Choosing the right system was critical, as the goal was to get every NeoSystems client to use the system. When it was first launched, Nutrient Workflow was used for outsourced financial services provided to its clients, which included payroll, invoicing, and financial statement preparation and distribution. NeoSystems has always performed these functions internally and for clients who have outsourced their back-office activities to NeoSystems.

“All processes we use for our clients we use ourselves, too,” said Marty Herbert, business analysis manager. “That allows us to bring real‐world experience to the table when we design and implement processes for our clients.”

The system has quickly grown to encompass human resources functions such as requests for new hires, onboarding new hires, separation/termination paperwork, sales referrals, consultant bonuses, and accounts payable invoice processing. The system has proven valuable even in marketing, where the team uses it to assign employee blog posts.

Each process allows the requester to return to work doing their best instead of worrying about sending reminders and notifications. Tracking the progress of the requests is as simple as checking the status in the system.

NeoSystems currently uses Nutrient Workflow to process about 50+ different request types. About 7,000 requests were processed in the first year, but as new requests have been added and the company’s business has grown, the rate has increased exponentially. Now NeoSystems processes over 15,000 requests internally annually.

Benefits

1. Improved Processes With Automation

“The biggest single benefit, in terms of overall impact to NeoSystems, is the improvement in our customer invoice approval process,” said Herbert.

“Within our internal invoicing function, before Nutrient Workflow, we were running on a 15‐day approval cycle, from the initial email being sent to a client manager to finally sending out a bill to the customer. Now the invoice approval time is under a day. That represents a big improvement in efficiency and an even more noticeable improvement to our Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)”.

And Tinsley got his wish—Nutrient Workflow has become a solution that delivers value to clients well above the benefit of increased security. According to Herbert, both employees and clients have come to expect the ease of request initiation, automated workflow, and the ultimate receipt of approvals delivered by the Nutrient Workflow process. They can’t imagine returning to the old manual, paper/email-intensive routine.

“Rather than having to dig through hundreds of emails an employee typically receives each day to find those that contain transactional data, open up the attachments, find the information they need to review, and then document their approval in a return email, we can present the information to users right on the screen, so they can just push a single button and they’re done. The sensitive information does not have to travel through email, and our project directors don’t even have to worry about typing up an email response to say they approve,” Herbert noted.

2. Improved Client Referral and Onboarding

Other improved processes are client referral and new client onboarding processes. If an employee knows of a company that could use NeoSystems’ services, she can fill out a short form in the Nutrient Workflow system, automatically sent to the sales department for follow-up. Additionally, this process tracks the initiator of the referral so they will receive a gift card bonus ‐ an added incentive for making the referral.

Once the sales department converts the lead into a new client, the onboarding process can begin in a streamlined process in Nutrient Workflow.

Because the sales department is responsible for selling multiple services in multiple departments, a new client might span several service areas, which would mean someone in sales would have to send multiple emails throughout the organization, wait for responses, follow up if action was not taken, and keep track of the status of each new client task.

Now, someone in sales can fill out one form, hit a button, and based on what was selected on the form, the new sales contact will be sent out to IT, HR, managed accounting services, and any other department to which it might be relevant. The onboarding process even tracks and routes information on the commission approval for the salesperson involved. This level of automation and traceability has allowed the Sales department to get back to what they do best – selling – instead of worrying about the downstream performance of the individual departments.

3. IT Functionality

Herbert can attest personally to the benefits enjoyed by the IT department and said the Local File Copy is his favorite recent addition to the Nutrient Workflow system. The Local File Copy plug‐in can save workflow file attachments to a local path/directory on the server. When designing a workflow, the system administrator can add a Local File Copy task after any task containing file attachments you want to copy or store.

“One of the huge benefits for us has been local file copy,” said Herbert. “I LOVE that thing! As a plug‐in—it has saved us more than 10 hours a month just in file management. On the back end of every one of our processes, we had invoices and financial statements that needed to be loaded to a specific and secure network location so that clients could get to the data when needed. We were doing it by triggering a support ticket to our IT helpdesk, who would go into the process, pull out the file, “save as,” and do that for every invoice or financial statement transaction.

When we implemented the Local File Copy plug‐in, there was a backlog of about 600 transactions, with approximately 150 new transactions added each billing cycle. It took our team member about two days to get through those, but now the entire process is automated, saving days of effort each cycle.”

4. ROI

From Tinsley’s point of view, the foremost return for NeoSystems has been the security the system provides for proprietary financial information. The on‐premise solution offered by Nutrient Workflow and implemented by NeoSystems ensures no breaches due to human error or unauthorized email interception. Maintaining a stellar reputation in this area is vital to the company’s continued growth because of the nature of the information, the process, and the type of clients they work with. With all the security breaches in the news today, this is an area that all companies need to address.

Another major return has been greater efficiency and time savings due to the ease of request generation and approvals. Cutting off two weeks from the invoice approval process is a significant financial benefit, as is saving 10 hours a month in the IT department.

“The automation has been great – the fact that the system itself creates efficiency without having to rely on human interaction really pays us back.” 

Post Implementation

Nutrient Workflow has given NeoSystems a new tool with which to help its clients. When a client presents them with a manual process, NeoSystems has a tool to help automate and streamline their operations. NeoSystems continues looking for new ways to employ Nutrient Workflow internally and as a client solution. The development team has conducted pilot projects using plug‐ins like Excel Batch, Web Services, and PDF Generator. The combination of these plugins allows process administrators to leverage existing work and harness the power of Excel, system interfaces, and form generation for processes ranging from human capital to information technology to accounting and finance.

Partnering with Nutrient Workflow

In 2014, NeoSystems began a new project for a major client with nearly 80,000 employees. The system NeoSystems was chosen to develop would include 1,800 of those employees. Due to the size of this one client, the IT services team at NeoSystems realized that they would need a standalone solution rather than participating in the shared processes which the company uses to support the rest of its clients.

“We knew we needed to set up a separate instance of the Nutrient Workflow system for this client,” said Herbert. “Because of the experience we gained in designing processes that worked across multiple clients within our managed accounting services, we were able to design processes to address this particular client’s requirements which were much more complex and voluminous than those typically required. We were able to leverage our specific knowledge about Nutrient Workflow software to help our clients incorporate the solution into the rest of their operations.

“That’s why we became an Nutrient Workflow partner. When you are in the business of providing back office services, looking for efficiencies and ‘a better way’ to do your work, Nutrient Workflow is your best friend and has become almost second nature for NeoSystems.”

About NeoSystems

NeoSystems Corp., based in Tysons Corner, Virginia, delivers strategic back-office services and solutions for government contractors, nonprofit organizations, and commercial entities. Utilizing best-of-breed technology and leveraging in-depth expertise in Accounting & Finance, Human Capital Management, Hosting (SOC1/SOC2, FISMA, FeDRamp), and Information Technology, our team helps companies improve vital operations, reduce overhead costs, and comply with complex federal requirements. We enable our clients to grow, become more profitable, efficient, and better equipped to win new business. For five consecutive years, NeoSystems has been named one of America’s fastest-growing private companies by Inc. Magazine. For more information, visit www.neosystemscorp.com.