The road to automation
The entire process, from initial meeting to deployment, took only a few months. The Vertigon team developed a solution that included an encrypted portal to receive data, an SSO solution to O365 to deliver results, and its secret sauce: a rules-based engine that allows the client’s own analysts to create business rules and have them ingested just as data is ingested. This represented a considerable cost savings because Vertigon was not required to be engaged for modifications to business rules.
“The Vertigon team challenged us to think more broadly by not just focusing on eliminating manual work but also on creating an environment where the analysis is embedded into the reporting,” said the Fortune 50 Company’s assistant vice president of Procurement Services.
Vertigon held the reins of the project along the road to automation, not just by implementing the technology, but also running meetings and procuring requirements.
“It was not an ad hoc process, and we brought a lot of structure so as to have both parties collaborate,” said Phani Gupta, VP of Operations with Vertigon Consulting. “It was a series of regular meetings capped by quarterly summits.”
Work progressed so smoothly that the Fortune 50 Company was able to take over the center of project, as automation had been introduced to multiple stages of the reporting process:
- Data collection
- Rules creation
- Rules processing
- Data processing
- Reporting
- Distribution
A robust solution leads to increased productivity
The successful transition to automated reporting resulted in a roughly 300 percent increase in productivity for the Fortune 50 Company, which continues to work with Vertigon to this day.
“Vertigon Consulting has been an instrumental partner in achieving the Data Analytics Team’s vision of automating and enhancing reporting and delivering procurement analytics,” said the assistant vice president. “Since kickoff of the project, both sides have partnered continuously to take an off-the-shelf offering from Microsoft and customize it to account for the Global Procurement operating environment. That work continues today, and will into the future, with the Global Procurement Data Analytics team taking the lead and leveraging Vertigon’s technical expertise.”
In fact, Sandman said the stellar work by Vertigon has also led to additional work within different departments in the company, as well as other Fortune 1000 companies.
“We have the appetite, we have a robust solution, we have the team—we are just waiting for more opportunities to open up,” said Gupta.