Challenge: An outdated purchasing process

With a proven history as a leading provider of financial technology (fintech) and regulatory technology (regtech) solutions to financial institutions and other businesses, Computer Services, Inc. (CSI) continuously strives to deliver the best possible service to its clients. However, over time, the company came to rely on several legacy paper and spreadsheet-based workflows that had become a standard mode of operation.

This included a legacy process for the allocation of equipment for both customers and employees which relied on a centralized spreadsheet that required constant updates. Maintenance proved to be cumbersome and prone to errors.

Solution: An error-free process

With this new purchasing process, users can easily make requests for equipment for either customers or internal needs. This workflow, which facilitates requisitions from start to finish, begins with a SmartForm. Users can initiate the request and designate whether it’s either an operating expense for small purchases or a capital expense. It collects information about the devices that are changing, what you need to purchase, and what those quotes are. In the case of operating expenses, it confirms whether there is an existing capital expense line item in the master budget.

This new end-to-end process makes it much more intuitive to ensure a reduction of errors, as well as streamline the approval chain of command for approvers.

Challenge: Error prone processes

CSI’s Managed Services team, who are the front line for strategic IT customer engagements, initially identified a need for a digital process automation solution to integrate with its cloud-based ticketing system Autotask. The process CSI refers to as MAC (Move/Add/Change) had numerous process steps which are integrated with both Autotask and Microsoft SQL Server. As this activity touches the company’s most strategic clients through their managed services journey, CSI found it to be critical to have an end-to-end managed process to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction.

Solution: A managed, integrated process

The MAC process starts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a customized button that kicks off the Nintex K2 Five workflow. This passes opportunity-specific information to the form, which is used to do a lookup on its details. The CSI representative will have an opportunity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM that is related to a move/add/change in which the customer has any number of devices that need to be changed in some way, such as adding new servers or requesting that new servers be added to their network.

The ability to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Nintex K2 Five using its out-of-the-box service broker have been of great benefit. CSI can now link opportunity data within its CRM system while easily addressing the complex workflow of appropriately routing to the correct people and creating all artifacts within Autotask.

Challenge: An abundance of minor manual workflows

As a 50-year-old company, CSI had numerous simple workflows that represented busy and often repeatable work. Of the more than 50 workflows which have been automated by the company, roughly 30 have been identified which can function with no human interaction.

Solution: Freeing up employee time

One of the many unmanaged processes enable appropriate email routing when documents are entered into a Microsoft SharePoint document library. The company extensively uses email-enabled documents, and to support automated routing of these emails, workflows are activated when one of these documents gets uploaded to the document library.

“Automated workflows are really an unsung hero in IT,” says Tyler Clark, Systems Engineer at CSI. “This is one of the key integration points we have between several different systems, and if you asked users, they have no idea that Nintex K2 Five is enabling critical tasks at CSI.“