B2B ecom and self-service procurement at Equans
 

Challenges

ENGIE Fabricom Operational Support Services (OSS) is the key provider of supplies for Fabricom’s operational business divisions and manages more than 25 million Euro’s worth of goods (rental tools and consumables) via four locations in Belgium. Until ICOMS and Bizagi were used, most of the order and delivery process was executed through e-mail and telephone, and the key IT tools used were Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and SAP. The process was characterized by archaic, manually-supported activities, with low transparency and control, a high level of errors in goods picking and delivery, and customer satisfaction was sub-optimal. ENGIE Fabricom OSS reached out to Digital Innovation to build an integrated, automated and digital solution.

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The solution

After a short analysis and design phase, a first prototype was developed. This first prototype helped ENGIE Fabricom OSS to better understand the problems at hand, and to actually experience what an integrated digital solution could work and look like. After this, an agile, iterative development project started. It took less than six months to launch the integrated ICOMS and Bizagi solution, covering self-service procurement and ordering of supplies, automated order management and picking, integration with external carriers and several back-end integrations with SAP, hand-scanners and several other enterprise capabilities, such as authentication with OKTA and the implementation of OData to integrate with the OSS ERP systems, OTMS.

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ICOMS: customer-facing B2B e-commerce

The solution consists of two key components: the ICOMS, a B2B e-commerce platform, fully catering typical industrial and engineering needs in the area of procurement and supply management. ICOMS is built on Microsoft .NET and is an enterprise-level capability, hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud, extremely performant and scalable and also offers responsive views, to use the platform on smartphones and tablets. ICOMS covers the customer-facing functionalities, such as browsing and searching for products and check-out, and transmits the order to the second part of the solution, the Bizagi back-end.

 

Bizagi: back-end fulfillment

Bizagi is a highly flexible BPMS and digital platform, mainly driven by the case management concept, Service Oriented Architecture standards and principles, and as a low-code solutions, is able to deliver business applications in an extremely agile and fast manner.

 

Automate what can be automated

When the order from ICOMS is sent to Bizagi, it creates a case which, driven by a set of smart business rules and through a highly intelligent spectrum of events, triggers and actions performs a workflow that ensures that so-called "standard orders" (orders for products which are part of the standard product catalog and for which there is sufficient stock available) are dealt with in a fully automated manner. This includes the creation of goods reservations in SAP, creation of picking documents, automatic planning of the shipment request with external carriers and the notifications with the many stakeholders involved, such as the requestor, managers for approvals and administrative personnel, if required.

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Specialised workflows for non-standard requests

For orders that are not standard (for items that are in the product catalog as being generic items, or special items which require a separate, special treatment) a workflow is started, connecting all the different actors and processes that are needed to make the special goods delivery. Interesting to know is that for special requests that require an RFP or high-budget investment requests, other Bizagi workflows are automatically triggered and pushed across the organization.

 

Results, return on investment and future plans

This solution delivered ENGIE Fabricom OSS a very customer-friendly digital self-service suite, with several economical and qualitative benefits as well. The cost of operations decreased dramatically, process changes can be implemented in a matter of days, and through the standardization there are several bottom-line savings made.

 

However, even most important, it created head-space for other innovations and helped OSS to free up valuable resources and knowledge to focus on OSS' core business: delivering highly-trustable, safe and economical goods to Fabricom’s operational units –resulting in increase of revenues on a group level.