Leading property group cuts CAPEX approval time from weeks to hours

Critical capital expenditure approvals were being held back by a fragmented mix of Excel spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and SharePoint documents. Paperwork moved from desk to desk through multiple approval stages before being manually entered into SAP. If anyone in the chain was on leave, the entire process ground to a halt.

The Excel-based forms were unreliable and difficult to use, and manual SAP data entry created data integrity issues. With the CAPEX workflow managed separately from Anaplan, the business's financial modelling system, project managers had no real-time visibility over budgets or where their request sat in the approval chain. The lack of traceability made auditing challenging.

The business needed a solution to automate and streamline the entire CAPEX approval process, with seamless integration with both Anaplan and SAP.

Built in just eight weeks by PhoenixDX using OutSystems, the CAPEX Workflow application sits between Anaplan and SAP,  automating the end-to-end approvals process and eliminating the manual handling that had plagued the business.

Submissions prepared in Anaplan are automatically routed to the workflow, where approvals are governed by business parameters such as department, type, and cost. Approvers receive alerts and can review, comment, and action submissions from anywhere via mobile. The easy, on-screen visualisation of important information for analysis and decision-making allows fast execution of CAPEX approvals.

If someone is on leave, the workflow automatically redirects to the next delegated authority - keeping things moving without manual intervention. Once approved, submissions are set up in SAP automatically, with the full process trackable and auditable at every step.