The Challenge
About eight years ago, NCDC’s senior management recognised that improvements were needed in the organisation’s purchase requisition practices. Budget overruns had become too common and it was difficult to achieve clear insights into how spending was tracking during financial periods.“We had deployed a Sage 300 platform about five years prior and this had helped us to streamline some areas such as our general ledger,” says Edith Laufa – NCDC Financial Controller. “However, it was clear to us that our requisition workflows needed some extra work.”
NCDC’s manual requisitions processes were slowing decision-making processes and leading to the potential for misallocation of funds and overspending.
“It was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain a clear picture of spending commitments and up-to-date budget positions. This meant managers in some sections could continue to spend funds on legitimate projects even when the budgets allocated for those projects had been exhausted.”
The manual nature of purchase requisition creation and approval was also proving problematic. A paper trail of documents was resulting in some being lost or misplaced, causing difficulties when it came to reconciling transactions against approved budgets.
“At the same time, the volume of work being conducted by the NCDC was continuing to increase as the city grew. We knew we had to find a way to improve the efficiency and accuracy of our financial workflow.”
The Solution
After examining a range of options on the market, NCDC made the decision in early 2014 to adopt new software from Pacifictech.Jerry Nicholas, NCDC Systems Consultant, says Pacifictech had a variety of modules designed to integrate with Sage 300 platforms and provide additional workflow support and document management capabilities. “It was clear they could provide the capabilities we required to overcome our workflow and transaction processing challenges.”
A decision was also taken to retain the services of technology partner MicroChannel. With considerable experience working with both Sage 300 and Pacifictech, MicroChannel was well placed to assist NCDC evaluate its existing workflows and deploy the new software needed to streamline them.
The Benefits
- Automation of processesThe tedious, paper-based manual processes, requisition raising, purchase order creation and approvals now automatically flow through the required authority levels electronically.
- Remote approvalsThe ability for managers to have web-based access to requisition items means authorisation is given regardless of where they happened to be working.
- Eliminates overspendingVisibility of up-to-date budgets has removed the risk of departments spending above their limits.
- No lost or damaged documentsDocuments are retained within the system & can no longer be lost or misplaced. This is of great help when it comes to audits and accountability
- Significant reduction in processing timeTransactions down from 14 days to complete, to within seven days.
The Conclusion
With the new purchase requisition module in place and operating effectively, focus is on how other elements within the finance function can be made more efficient. The next step will be to make improvements through the deployment of additional Pacifictech solutions to ensure the objectives of enhanced efficiency and lower operational costs are achieved.“With MicroChannel and Pacifictech in place as trusted IT partners, we are confident we have the mix of experience and expertise to support our growing operations well into the future”.
Stefan Coetzer, Sage Practice Manager at MicroChannel, added that the elimination of timeous paperwork together with the mobility of the Pacifictech solution has accelerated the speed for approvals.