Case Study: Automating Key Processes for National Distribution Company

The Challenge: Inefficient processes holding operational excellence back

This client is an established leader in their division, distributing a wide range of products across North America.

With the Technical Project team juggling up to 20 projects at one time, but no procedure in place to maintain updates and quality control, this client’s manual proposal and quote process saw major inefficiencies and inaccuracies introduced.

A significant amount of time was wasted being stuck in manual tasks that could have been avoided, like manual updates, individually emailing each vendor, file checks and multiple revisions due to inaccurate data moving through multiple copies circulated.

To top it off, all automations were created and maintained via Apps Script, creating delays while waiting for the already stretched IT department to make minor changes like date changes on RFP processes.

The Solution: Automating repetitive processes with zenphi

Zenphi was implemented to automate the client’s Quoting, RFP and Work Order processes, achieving what used to take hours in only 2 clicks.

Due to zenphi’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface, this solution enables the technical project team to create and maintain their own workflows, minimizing their reliance on IT, and freeing up time across both departments to focus on more strategic and interesting projects.

The Result: Operational excellence driving employee efficiency, growth, and supplier satisfaction

With zenphi in place to drive process improvement and innovation, this client has minimized their backlog, improved service to vendors, and saved up to 20 hours per week per technical team member. This enables their team to achieve more, focus on higher value projects, and boost employee engagement and satisfaction without having to work overtime to stay on top of monotonous, repetitive tasks. 

Empowering employees with automation

The team is now able to manage, optimize and update their own workflows and process automations, freeing up the IT team’s time to focus on more strategic and higher value projects without being bogged down by constant change requests. 

Improved quality & consistency

Zenphi enables efficient version and quality control across all documents for the team. All data for each process is now kept in a single automatically populated Google sheet, maintaining accuracy and efficiency at all times. Where the team had to previously juggle multiple files and version types over email, they can now reference a single document that they can trust is up to date. 

Greater supplier satisfaction

A previously tedious supplier communications process has also been simplified, replacing multiple channels, contacts and manual uploads with a single portal that analyzes and automatically routes documents on supplier submission to ensure all files, requests and orders are dealt with quickly and accurately.

How do their suppliers feel about zenphi? The results speak for themselves:

“I am very pleased to work with a company that utilizes a tool such as zenphi for automation. As a Google reliant company, this makes it so much easier for me to understand the process for site and multi site bids… I have been so impressed with zenphi, that I brought this to the attention of my own leadership team as a demonstration concept to help automate our own Google tasks.” 

– Senior Account Manager

The journey ahead

After seeing the results of zenphi implemented in one department, management decided to roll out the use of zenphi to automate other key areas of the business. 

Watch this space – this is just the beginning!