Paper approvals deserve to go the way of the Dodo

Challenges faced

• Overwhelmed IT. RAK's IT team was stretched due to the large number of requests assigned to them.

• Paper-based forms. Receiving requests via paper forms and the difficulty tracking them made it worse for the IT team.

• Delayed approvals. Approvals from stakeholders involved weeks of following up and a lot of back and forths.

Solution

RAK used a traditional way of managing operations in the organization across departments. One person would send a task request or approval that would go back and forth through a trail of paperwork.

When Hashim had to send a request order to someone in a department to initiate a process, he had to wait for weeks before the tasks finally came back to life. It was demoralizing for him to see the tasks not being followed up, approved, or taken seriously at all. His team and others lost a lot of time trying to get papers signed, and there was a lot of blame happening among cross-functioning teams.

Hashim credits Kissflow for helping his company stay on top of tasks without unnecessary delays.

“After (implementing) Kissflow, everything is smooth. Everyone can manage their work. People are not blaming others anymore as managers can now see how a task is progressing, where it is stuck, or who is delaying it. Everything is fast now,” Hashim said.

Substituting RAK’s manual workflow process with Kissflow has set order to things. Now teams don’t pass the buck to other departments, and the process is transparent. Approvals are quick, procurements are done on time, and initiators of tasks are informed about how far a request has progressed.

“What took us one hour previously now takes just 5-10 minutes. Everyone uses their computer to follow tasks and process them forward to the next stage.”

And during the very few times when his team encountered a problem using Kissflow, the support team quickly helped him troubleshoot the issues.

Results

With Kissflow, Rafic A Kreidie was quick to accomplish the following:

• Created a structured, automated process

• Increased accountability across the organization

• Reduced the burden on IT

Hashim and his whole team are very happy to see the internal operations and processes speed up at RAK and are anxious to try to improve them in new ways.