MAGAZINE N. 43 | Training Citizen Developers: Jamio Takes Center Stage in the Short Master's Program at the University of Turin

PREMISE

Many business processes in organizations are inter-enterprise or cross-business , meaning they extend beyond the boundaries of the organization .

These processes may include collaboration and information exchange between companies or entities to create value for all involved. Examples include supply chain management involving suppliers , but also customer relationship management , business partnerships ( with partners or agents), intercompany collaboration , shared logistics , project coordination between different organizations, or even some recruiting .

It's not always easy to be fully aware of managing a process that extends across your organization. And when you're trying to streamline the process with the support of IT tools, even going as far as digitizing it, you might tend to ignore the part of the flow that involves external entities or organizations. However, even if this doesn't happen, this represents a crucial point in management .

Effective management of these processes is achieved by using appropriate tools that allow for the management and monitoring of the entire flow, avoiding multiple systems and information redundancy. This also increases efficiency by outsourcing activities that would otherwise be performed internally.

In this issue we try to find out how, looking at the use case of Quote Management of interest in the supply chain - procurement .

ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS

Let's imagine we're on a construction site. In this context, as in many others, the materials procurement process requires careful planning, diligent management, and effective communication with suppliers to ensure the success of the construction project. The key is to manage the initial phase of this process, namely supplier evaluation .

Once the materials that need to be procured have been identified, an organization's purchasing department needs to request a quote for the same supply from N potential suppliers, asking each for both the quote and other information, in order to make a correct evaluation.

The simplest and most commonly used way to manage this process is the following, where all the activities are entrusted to a purchasing office operator who:

1) define the list of materials in an Excel table;

2) composes a request for quotation letter in Word or another tool, including the details of the requested supply;

3) compose a generic email attaching the request and send it N times to various recipients or use the BCC;

4) waits for the N recipients to respond via email;

5) collects the individual responses, as they arrive, in a folder;

6) analyze all the answers;

7) aggregates the information obtained in a comparative table.

This flow uses individual productivity tools such as Word, email and Excel which, while supporting the operator, still leave him the owner of everything.

Suppliers participate indirectly in the flow, but they operate independently, and the information they provide requires further processing. This results in significant time wastage and potential errors .

THE SOLUTION

By trying to manage this flow with a process automation like Jamio, we obtain complete end-to-end automation of the process, including the collection and aggregation of responses from external parties, with significant advantages in terms of time and costs, among other things.

The flow described above becomes the following.

The purchasing office operator:

1) defines the list of materials in a specific tab in the system and indicates the recipients by selecting them from a list, always in the same interaction tab;

2) Click a button to delegate all the rest of the tasks to the system.

The system, in complete automation:

3) automatically composes the request for quotation letter, customized for each supplier;

4) create a questionnaire for the supplier, and provide a link to it;

5) automatically composes the accompanying email, personalized for each supplier, inserting the link to the questionnaire and attaching the letter requesting the offer and sends it;

6) monitors the completion of the questionnaire, collects the results and reports them in the request form;

The purchasing office operator can thus simply and exclusively:

7) consult the results and information collected in real time, always in the same interaction sheet.

It is clear that all those human activities that involve a waste of time and margins of error are thus delegated to an IT system, such as filling out the request for quotation or the email, starting from predefined templates, or the collection and aggregation of responses.

Furthermore, external stakeholders, such as suppliers, actively participate in the process, as the supplier inputs their information in a guided manner into an object—the questionnaire—orchestrated by the system. This allows for real-time access to the results directly in the system, without the need to distribute credentials to the supplier.

THE ADVANTAGES

• reduction of management times
• error reduction
• increase in branding reputation towards suppliers
• Instant sharing of data and documents
• Employment of operators in higher value-added activities
• Organizational efficiency