Petredec

Invoice Approval Workflow with WEBCON

Petredec is a global trading and shipping company for liquified petroleum gas (LPG). With decades of experience the company has grown into the worlds leading trader, logistics provider and distributer of LPG as well as providing one of the planets most promising cleaner burning and sustainable sources of energy in LPG.

Petredec loads, delivers, and trades products on six continents, and they are the proud owners of the youngest fleet on the water amongst LPG shipowners. Environment and sustainability is of high importance to the company and they are a market leader in working with companies to help reduce emissions.

Petredec approached Dolphin IT Solutions about the use of digital processes to help manage invoices within the company. Petredec receive new invoices every day with all of them having to be approved and processed correctly. What they needed was a system that could allow users to upload an invoice and provide all the required information about that invoice, send for approval, and then wait for it to be processed.

The system would need to integrate with their current systems for managing invoice payments so that once the invoice had been paid the new system would update and progress the invoice. As we worked with Petredec we developed more systems and processes for them and plan to build more in the future.

The Solution

Dolphin IT Solutions proposed the use of WEBCON to build out the new processes. WEBCON will provide all the functionality they require but one system they needed to be integrated was SharePoint and WEBCON works seamlessly with SharePoint.

The following processes have currently been built by our expert business process developers for Petredec:

  • Invoice Approval Process
  • KYC Approval Process
  • SOP Approval Process
  • Demurrage Process

All these processes allow users to upload attachments, log details about the document or item, communicate between colleagues and upload documents to SharePoint. Each process also sends relevant emails to users notifying them they have a new task to complete but WEBCON also provides dashboards presenting all the tasks for the logged in user so they will always have a view of their current tasks.

For the Invoice approval process and SOP process we have created automated steps which will continuously check that the invoice has been paid. The system will check a SQL table, using data from the WEBCON form, to check if the current invoice has been paid and if so it will progress the invoice to the next step in the process.

To ensure the SQL table is up to date and readily available we have created an API. This API will retrieve data from another database that is used by another system for processing invoice payments. Once it has retrieved the data it will populate the SQL table in the database which the new WEBCON process has access to. This table is constantly being updated so that once an invoice has been paid the WEBCON process will have this information readily available to update the invoice on the new process and flag it as being paid.

Once the invoice has been fully processed and complete the WEBCON process will upload the invoice to SharePoint, which will provide users access to the invoice and the ability to view it.

With using WEBCON as the core system for the new processes it comes with all extra functionalities that have proven to be beneficial to Petredec. The processes allow admins to delegate and reassign tasks to other users with the capability to provide instructions and reason for the reassignment of the task. This can be useful when users are away on annual leave and they have been assigned tasks that need completing or users are no longer available so their tasks need to be reassigned.

WEBCON also provides reporting tools and we have created many reports and dashboards for Petredec to help visualise their data and to help spot trends as well as any issues with the data that has been entered into the form. A real benefit for users with the reports it to check the progress of invoices and other items in the process. Users can check their invoices at any time to see how they are progressing in the system.

Following the success of the processes we have designed and developed for Petredec we are always looking to improve and develop new processes for them. WEBCON is beneficial for this as it provides the needs for processes to be developed and improved upon with rapid application development and instant change, meaning any new updates can instantly be applied to the processes without any downtime as well as develop new processes quickly for users to test and provide feedback quickly.