Case Study: Transforming Business Processes in 75% Less Time Than Traditional ERPs

The Company:

SOCAR Malaysia is a leading and fast-growing car rental company with extensive coverage across the country, achieving their goal of reshaping the way people own, rent and use cars.

The Challenge: Manual processes creating significant inefficiencies across multiple departments

Multiple manual workflows across teams created unnecessary stress, inaccuracies and inefficiencies – particularly for the Accounts Payable and IT security teams. With manual processes relying on hundreds of difficult to track email chains and no clear visibility of approvals, it was clear that change was required. This is where a Project Manager driving digital transformation for the team found zenphi.

The Solution: Automating repetitive processes across multiple departments with zenphi

Multiple projects using zenphi were delivered in a fraction of the time and cost it would have taken with traditional ERP tools. With zenphi, several processes across SOCAR’s business, including for the Finance, IT, Legal and Commercial teams, are now streamlined.

The business’ payment request and invoice processing workflows are now transformed, enabling a clear view of all invoices at any stage. The approval and payment workflow is simply triggered by a Google Form, with automatic updates, task assignment and audit trail management maintained with zenphi. 

IT security has also received a boost with a formal approval process now established. With zenphi, users request access through a Google Form, the request is automatically routed to the appropriate team member(s), and audit trails are consistently maintained to ensure reliable user management and security.

Clear approval workflows are now also in place for legal and commercial review processes, routing documents for review and approval, along with creating and maintaining a centralized repository.

The Result: Efficiency-boosting projects delivered across multiple departments in 75% less time than traditional solutions, and at only 15% of the cost

Zenphi’s flexible drag-and-drop workflow builder enables the SOCAR team to create, update and maintain their automations in 75% less time than it would have taken with traditional ERP solutions. With zenphi, the team have transformed key processes across multiple departments to significantly boost accuracy, efficiency and visibility.

Streamlined Accounts Payable approval process saves Finance team 40% of processing time, while eliminating human error & enabling visibility of all accounts:

With a complete overhaul of their invoice processing workflow, the elimination of manual tracking for hundreds of invoices, often with inaccuracies and delays, means the finance team can now focus at least 40% of their processing time on achieving other tasks. Before zenphi, team members had to manually search for the status of individual invoices and copy/paste documents across folders. Now, the status and audit trail are automatically updated and visible from a single source of truth.

Formal user request and approval process enables complete visibility of access & security, decreasing total access by 70%:

SOCAR’s IT department’s new formal user request management process automatically creates a much-needed audit trail and provides full visibility of access requests and approvals that the team did not have prior to zenphi. Company-wide IT security standards received a boost, with an estimated 70% decrease in access to business content, enhancing data protection and enabling peace of mind for the IT team.

Reliable approval workflows & confirmation emails for commercial review processes maintains accuracy & clarity:

Minimizing the amount of time required to manually update team members and review documents for the legal team, these two quick confirmation and approval workflows ensure accurate documentation and a clear view of the status and version of any submitted contract.

Advice for anyone starting their automation journey:

Having had no prior process automation experience to fall back on when setting out on their first automation, the team were hesitant, as usually additional learning time is required with new ERPs. However, with zenphi, development was quick and easy from the start.

SOCAR’s advice for anyone new to automation? Have a clear understanding of what you want to capture, how it starts, how it can be incorporated into your existing workflows, and the steps needed in between. With zenphi, “as long as you know what you want, then you can create a workflow that suits your needs”.