Perfecting the recipe for fast, efficient business processes

To protect its profit margins, United Foods must ensure that all aspects of its operations—from supply chains and manufacturing to finance, sales, and HR processes—run efficiently and cost-effectively. As it launched new products and expanded into new regions, the company found that manual processes struggled to keep pace with growth.

“We performed many key workflows such as audits, credit approvals and HR performance monitoring by hand,” comments Mamdouh Ahmed Nada, IT Head at United Foods. “For instance, we sent documents from desk to desk for management approval, and records of these approvals were scattered across multiple email inboxes—making it hard to find information during audits.”

He adds: “Generating key performance indicators [KPIs] for all our departments was so time-consuming that we were unable to drill down into our reports for fine-grained detail, which limited our visibility and prevented us from identifying new efficiencies.”

To streamline finance, reporting, and sales and gain greater insight into its operational efficiency, United Foods moved to integrated digital workflows, supported by SAP ERP applications. Taking this step helped the company to reimagine many of its core activities, but United Foods saw an opportunity to go even further.

“Deploying SAP ERP marked a sea change in the way we run our business,” explains Mamdouh Ahmed Nada. “As a next step, we aimed to reduce complexity and eliminate repetitive, low-value activities by embracing automation. We couldn’t do this alone, so we started the search for a technology partner to support us on our journey.”

After just two years, United Foods has already successfully automated over 35 key processes across multiple business units—from approving credit lines and generating purchase orders to HR reporting and raw materials planning.

“We’ve achieved huge time-savings with IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation by replacing manual workflows with seamless automated processes,” explains Mamdouh Ahmed Nada. “Our employees say that they are now able to carry out daily activities much faster and we’re no longer seeing bottlenecks in our operations.”

Leveraging deep integrations with SAP ERP, IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation has enabled United Foods to transform the way it extends lines of credit to its customers, which helps to accelerate sales processes. Today, sales teams can submit a request from a mobile or tablet which is automatically processed and forwarded to business leaders for approval from their mobile devices—eliminating the need for documents to be sent between offices for physical signatures. As soon as a credit limit is approved, it is automatically reflected in the company’s SAP ERP solution.

At the same time, United Foods has greatly improved KPI reporting with IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation. “With SAP ERP and IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, we can track KPIs for all our employees. This information helps us create effective performance targets at both the department and employee level, helping our teams to stay focused on working productively and efficiently.”

Streamlining and simplifying finance processes with IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation has also helped United Foods to reduce the time and manual effort involved during audits.

Mamdouh Ahmed Nada comments: “In the past, we would spend a long time gathering the records and evidence that our auditors had asked for. Today, I can sit down with an auditor and automatically bring up relevant information on purchase orders, invoices, costs and much more at the touch of a button—it’s a massive time-saver.”

Building on its success with the IBM and SAP solutions, United Foods plans to go completely paperless in the coming months.

Mamdouh Ahmed Nada concludes: “Our next step is to build a vendor management portal so our trading partners can submit information to us electronically, which will cut out all paper processing and manual data entry. Every second and every dollar we save using automation is time and money we can reinvest in developing our business and staying ahead of competitors—even in challenging market conditions.”