The purchasing department at Arizona State University had become overrun by paper-bound processes. For construction purchase orders, each purchase order request required a large packet of information to be copied and routed. Upon completion of processing, a purchase order was generated and up to five copies were made for archiving, departmental records and to be mailed to the vendor.
The purchasing department’s costs for printing, paper, and postage were mounting. With its filing room filling up, the department was almost out of storage space when it turned to the University’s Business Applications and Fiscal Control team to reinvent its purchase order process for construction purchasing.
In a redesigned business process, construction purchasing at the University now accepts purchase order request documentation, scans the documentation and converts it into PDF files to automate workflows. In many instances, departments now send the documents to construction purchasing as a PDF file via email rather than submitting paper documents.
All information goes into a Microsoft SharePoint repository where each construction purchase request is reviewed, processed and tracked. To add the scanned documentation and related information to SharePoint libraries, Arizona State uses Nuance’s eCopy desktop document imaging software.
This business process improvement has saved the University $10,000 per year in office supplies, paper and postage costs. It also contributes to advancing Arizona State University’s sustainability initiatives by reducing paper usage and the overall carbon footprint of the process.
“An essential ingredient to achieving business process improvements is pulling paper-based information out of workflows and converting it into electronic files that are easy to manage and distribute,” said John Chapman, systems analyst sr. in Business Applications and Fiscal Control at Arizona State University. “Working together, SharePoint and eCopy have helped us to enhance our business workflows that mix paper and electronic documents to reduce costs and accelerate processes.”
The University utilizes SharePoint for managing and collaborating on projects as well as automating select business workflows - with a primary goal of reducing paper throughout business processes. Nuance’s eCopy solution includes built-in integration with SharePoint so University personnel can easily add scanned documents into SharePoint and check them out of SharePoint as part of everyday workflows.
As University personnel work on a construction purchase order, they can use Nuance’s eCopy solution merge capabilities to “drag and drop” associated Microsoft Office documents into the PDF file. Nuance’s eCopy solution enables staffers to transform scanned images into editable text documents so they can make changes to the document.
Moving to an electronic purchasing workflow has also taken days out of internal audit processes. Previously staff needed to manually search for and gather paper documents from file cabinets. Now auditing staff can search the SharePoint libraries themselves to access the required documents.
Based on the success of the purchase order initiative, Arizona State University is looking to expand its utilization of SharePoint and Nuance’s eCopy solution in existing applications for property control, surplus property and business services.
