Improving the request process

Acklands-Grainer, a Canadian distributor of maintenance, repair, and operating products, wanted a more efficient, traceable way to process and fulfill equipment requests, account setups, and service requests.

The company had outgrown its e-mail-driven IT request form system, housed in public folders on the server, and wanted to replace it with an automated system that provided electronic approvals, real-time tracking, and built-in workflow. Acklands-Grainger also wanted to find a way to track and archive the data required for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations. The biggest challenge was assigning work and tracking its progress.

“We weren’t meeting SLAs (service level agreements) and things were falling through the cracks,” explains John Tzanopoulos, manager of IT operations at Acklands-Grainger. “I came from an organization that had a homegrown, written application on its database, so I knew what I thought we needed here. I was looking for something off-the-shelf to automate this system.”

After reviewing a number of possibilities, the IT team chose software from Nutrient Workflow. In early 2006, Acklands-Grainger implemented Nutrient Workflow 3.5 in its IT department for change management, and they developed a request management form with Nutrient Workflow 4.3 last November.

“We’ve combined a lot of separate task forms into one big form, as opposed to having a form for a phone request and another form for a user account, and a form for this and a form for that,” says Tzanopoulos.

In a recent press release, Nutrient Workflow outlines the benefits of its solution at Acklands-Grainger:

• The IT team can fulfill and track the progress of each request more easily, and requests are processed faster. Users can go directly into the system and see where their requests are.

• The former request management system was designed to be used only by managers, but now anyone in the company can create a form and route it to a manager for approval.

• Nutrient Workflow has a built-in capability that offers reporting and analytics, simplifying SOX compliance.

• Requests are processed with increased speed, efficiency, and accuracy, which allows employees to focus on serving customers rather than worrying about technical problems.

“It’s changing the culture and it’s catching on,” says Tzanopoulos. “If we show customers the service level of improvement, they’ll have no problem in the future filling out a request form.”

(Originally posted on KMWorld.com)