Business Situation
A big issue for Panrico as they continue to grow their business is to improve the decision-making process around investment decisions. They wanted to make them more efficient and more effective by reducing the lifecycle time of investment evaluation. In order to do this, Accenture proposed a Microsoft based solution that would speed up the process and would give decision-makers access to the information they need, when they needed it. Accenture and Avanade built a team to provide the best functional and technical solution for this challenge.

Solution
This team created a solution which automates the approval process for investment requests for good and services by all Panrico departments. The solution infrastructure consists of three replicated Exchange 2000 servers covering all company departments. The automated workflow model used features such as Microsoft Workflow Designer for Exchange utilizing a graphical user interface (GUI) to create the workflow process as a diagram. This allowed tracking of the status of the request throughout the investment decision-making life cycle. The solution was customized by adding script to the events for automatic routing, email notifications, auto archive function, role delegation etc. In addition, the external parameters were defined to allow for easy administration of access control, identification of department responsible, decoding tables etc.With this solution, Avanade and Accenture expanded Panricos use of Microsoft Exchange beyond just email services to embrace collaborative solutions.

Results 

• Improved business decision-making by providing access to investment request information.
• Improved productivity by speeding up cycle time of an investment request and reducing time involved of the participants