Electronic Purchase Information Form

The internal tool, app integrates multiple data sources into a fit for purpose workflow process for staff to create and follow purchase requests. On submission of a request, the department head is notified of a requirement to review and approve or reject. Approval notifies the next required authorisation in the chain. Rejection ends the process and notifies the requestor. Approvals the overall request are timeframe restricted with the request expiring if the approvals are not all resolved.

What problem are we solving?

Requests were submitted to the purchasing department via a downloaded and printed out word document. once submitted, there was a high onus on the purchasing officers to process the forms, seeking confirmation and approval from relevant and responsible parties.

Digitising the physical forms and adding an automated business process management workflow Progress tracking, repeatability and distribution of workload to responsible parties improves FTE staff utilisation and inherent monitoring and notification ensures better quality control.

App Structure

• Requests – Default landing page and listing of the most recent requests (30 days from the current date) with options to filter by date range, vendor or requestor name, department or status of request
• Administration – App administrators can assign or revoke user to application roles. Create and maintain departments and departmental approvers. Adjust application limits which trigger process workflow pathways and events. apply granular access permissions to authorised role based users
• Reports – Snapshot infographic view of the last 60 days worth of requests with an ability to modify the date range and filter the stats by vendor, department and requestor.
• Delegations – Some roles can nominate an alternative approver either permanently until revoked or for a scheduled period of time.
• Request Form – A form based page, with a series of integrated data points to allow users to nominate a vendor, cost, related purchase order and requisition, and supporting information.
• Print to PDF – form submissions can be captured to PDF as a 1:1 facsimile at any status once submitted for approval.
• Approvals – The Request Form information is reviewed by approvers in a workflow process. The approvers are able to record a decision and provide a comment or explanation.
• Auditable Activity – Changes to the Request Forms and Administration configuration areas are logged with human readable data and filterable by date, action and user.
• Workflow – Automated processing of a multistage approval process according to configured wait, timeout and responsibility threshold limits.
• Data integration – A hybrid aggregation of cloud, on-site and SAP data

Reports uses the standard OutSystems Charts module along with advanced SQL queries to generate pivotal data. Additional options to search and filter the report data has been developed but not enabled in the final release.

Granular permissions re assigned to application roles via an application role and functionality matrix. Functions and Roles are dynamic elements within the system, so adding or removing roles or Functions will automatically provide a Role x Function matrix configuration point.

Application limits can be overridden by any user configured with the app administrator role. core application limits are shown without any associated icons. overridden values are shown with ‘x’ allowing an administrator to cancel the override. newly entered overrides show a ‘x’ and tick allowing the administrator to complete or cancel an override. Data integrity is preserved on existing requests such that previous requests hold a snapshot of the application limits at the time. New requests will be processed according to the overridden rule limits.