ERC innovates to transform internal operations

ERC came to Nutrient Workflow needing automation in its HR department. The company went from a few HR requests to 17 workflows in 18 months.

Background

ERC was established in 1988 by Dr. Y.C.L. Susan Wu, the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in Aeronautical Engineering from Caltech. The company now has more than 1,000 employees.

The organization works in many military and space research and development areas, including test and evaluation; operations and maintenance; and IT, software, and network administration. Its customers include NASA and different branches within the Department of Defense.

ERC has now been using Nutrient Workflow for just over two years.

The challenge

The company had grown to a point where it was no longer feasible to pass PDF/Word documents around via email for review and approval. It also became clear that the organization had no way to track progress and expose bottlenecks within its processes. In addition, the workflow platform had to interface with its ERP system to ensure data accuracy and reduce rework.

Issues also included:

• Lack of visibility
• Employees using out-of-date forms
• Forms weren’t being filled out correctly
• Missing information

ERC also needed a way to make its current workflows more customized. According to the team, most off-the-shelf products came with fixed workflows that didn’t work for what ERC needed to do.

Why Nutrient Workflow?

ERC’s Deltek(opens in a new tab) representative suggested ERC’s IT team contact Nutrient Workflow. Following the demonstration, the team decided Nutrient Workflow was a great fit for creating custom workflows and reducing rework by ensuring data accuracy due to its ERP integration.

The team was focused on:

• Creating custom, rules-based workflows based on data being entered in forms.
• Presenting users with dynamically driven form elements like search boxes and selectors tied to its accounting system’s data.
• Prepopulating specific employee information to ensure data accuracy.
• Meeting all of ERC’s strict security requirements.

Workflow implementation

Mark Williams, a senior business systems specialist at ERC, shared that “The implementation went very well. Nutrient Workflow’s staff initially held many coaching sessions with the ERC team to quickly get us up to speed.”

Because Nutrient Workflow is a low-code process application platform, the IT team could quickly develop forms and processes based on stakeholder meetings and demo them for validation.

“For the company, rolling out Nutrient Workflow was probably the most user-accepted implementation I’ve been a part of,” added Evan Wright, a business systems specialist at ERC.

ERC’s managers and frontline employees were very excited to see that IT was keeping up with modern trends of cloud-based solutions and finally moving away from paper-based processes.

What ERC has built with Nutrient Workflow

The team started by building out the organization’s most commonly used internal processes and tackling guest account-based processes. End users quickly bought into the new system and were happy with the process improvements.

“Nutrient Workflow has allowed us to streamline many processes that were either still on paper or not functioning efficiently,” said Williams. “It also allowed us to design these processes with the approval rules we wanted but could not have in our existing canned systems.”

Most of the solutions the team built initially were designed to make HR more paperless, which included processes for job offer datasheets, personnel change notices, and employee terminations.

The team has since been focusing on processes directly aimed at frontline employees, such as college tuition reimbursement, vacation buyback, security submissions, and, most recently, a workflow to improve the benefits enrollment process. The team has also developed a help desk request system to track access requests and IT issues.

All told, ERC has automated a variety of processes, including:

• Health care open enrollment
• College tuition reimbursement
• Conference room bookings
• Discipline and warnings
• Employee outreach
• Employee terminations
• Foreign travel
• IT support requests
• Job offers
• Military installation visit requests
• Personnel change notices
• Security submissions
• Subcontractor management
• System access requests
• Telework agreements
• Tuition assistance
• Vacation buyback

Results

According to Williams, “The results have been outstanding with many of our managers and employees letting us know how much they love the new processes and getting rid of the old way of filling out a form and emailing it around.”

For instance, the team has seen the best results within processes that deal with employee record changes. Employees find it easy to use, and managers appreciate the workflow efficiencies. ERC’s HR and finance departments found Nutrient Workflow to be both efficient and effective at reducing processing time, increasing data accuracy, and significantly cutting rework. While all these benefits were anticipated when evaluating Nutrient Workflow, there was an additional benefit identified post-implementation. This was the visibility of historical data. In particular, managers found the ability to review past employee transactions extremely helpful in processing current workflow transactions.

“Employee record changes was our original use case and served as our proof of concept that Nutrient Workflow could be a big benefit to ERC,” Wright shared. “The process involved a lot of administrative time and involved 6–7 levels of approval, outputting PDFs, many business rules, etc.”

The team has come to realize that Nutrient Workflow can handle a variety of business needs, from simple to complex processes. Additionally, because these processes are used across the organization, it has helped to shine a light on the IT team’s ability to solve problems and provide real, scalable business solutions. This is especially true because of the flexibility and customization Nutrient Workflow provides, unlike other applications ERC has used in the past.

What’s next?

The team has already rolled out processes to HR, IT, security, and contract sites and is now looking for other areas to implement automation.

Most of the process automation to date has been for form and approval-based workflows. Next, the team plans to build processes that integrate more deeply with its existing enterprise stack, using trigger-based, automated actions.

ERC has also moved to a concurrent license method to allow more employees to use the system — especially those using processes only intermittently.

In just 18 months, ERC went from a handful of HR requests to 17 fully automated workflows, with strong adoption across the organization and plans to expand further.