Customer Story

The Organisation

Kyvalley Dairy Group is one of Australia’s largest family-owned dairy businesses, known for supplying innovative fresh milk products to the APAC region from feed to final product.

We spoke to Matt Tanios, GM for Finance at Kyvalley, who was happy to share how with Flowingly their team has transformed their Capital Expenditure process, turning their manual, spreadsheet-heavy Capital Expenditure process into a streamlined, auditable digital experience.

The Challenge

When Kyvalley first approached us about workflow automation, their most frustrating organisational process issue was their Capital Expenditure process.

“When they said, what can we improve on? I think everyone just looked at each other and said, Capital Expenditure, start with that. It’s a big job, but I figured that’s the one where we could see the pay off immediately,” said Matt.

Since the process was across a few different departments, the main challenge was the lack of alignment and awareness of the process from start to finish.

Another issue was the large volume of emails circulating across the business, with processes often being bogged down in email threads and people being missed or added late into email chains.

“When two people are disputing a Capital Expenditure and you’ve got another 12 people in an email thread. What do I do? Do I approve? Do I wait?”

The executive team wanted Flowingly to be set up with the goal of streamlining and automating as many processes as possible, with the aim of fixing the least-effective procedures first before focusing on other areas of improvement.

That’s why they started with Capital Expenditure, the least effective process with the highest impact.

“It’s the only one that had operations annoyed by us constantly going back to them. It also annoyed IT too whenever we had to get urgent PCs and laptops set up and they didn’t know who to go to or what forms to fill out.”

The Solution

Flowingly was chosen by Kyvalley because it allowed their finance team to automate the Capital Expenditure process themselves without any IT or development assistance.

It was their GM Finance himself, Matt, who was the one jumping into Flowingly and building it out.

As one of the people dealing with Capital Expenditure processes every day, he was the perfect person to help build out and identify opportunities for improvement.

The other benefit of the platform that resonated with the team was the ability to see where a process was at, at any time.

Gaining visibility over processes was hugely beneficial to the Kyvalley team and helped them further identify process bottlenecks they might not have known existed.

It’s also been hugely beneficial to the executive team in proving the need for workflow automation and the inefficiencies of current processes.

The team will build out the process as it currently is and identify key areas for improvement and optimisation.

“The good thing about doing it on Flowingly is it will show our managers and our executives how good or bad the process currently is, so that if they do have any negative feedback on the flow, we can say, well that’s currently how the process is because it’s very hard to see a flaw in a process if you don’t have it mapped out,” said Matt.

Another key feature the Kyvalley team utilise are online approvals. Previously every Capital Expenditure request needed a manual signature for sign-off.

“That wasn’t really any safer because you would just get someone asking you to manually attach their signature.”

Now instead of a manual signature, the team take online approvals as their signature, making the process more modern and more efficient than ever before.

As Matt summed it up –

“You realise how precious time is, basically.”

The Results

The Kyvalley team have said that the Capital Expenditure process has already validated the investment in Flowingly.

“Capital Expenditure has already made Flowingly worthwhile for us. Any other processes are an added bonus.”

Their new Capital Expenditure process has streamlined and improved on the original process. It has also helped ensure all projects have an audit trail which demonstrates the correct approvals have taken place.

Instead of a bunch of paperwork sitting around waiting to be approved, the different relevant departments just get updates in Flowingly emails.

“For me getting automated emails from Flowingly isn’t nearly as bad as getting them from individuals. With individual emails we’ve got to reply or follow up but with Flowingly it just lets you know where the process is at.”

The visibility improvements have been instrumental for the Kyvalley team, ensuring processes are approved on time. It also means they have an auditable log of the status of every process historically, allowing them to clearly identify potential delays at a glance.

“When you go into Flowingly, you see five Capital Expenditure requests in progress and you just look at them and you see exactly which step each one’s at and you can straight away go ‘all right these four with the accountant, that’s fine. He’s told me he’s working on them. That one’s with approval. He hasn’t approved it in three days, what’s going on’ and you can follow up.”

Capital Expenditure is only the beginning too. Next up for the Kyvalley team is the automation of their New Product Development process, followed by their onboarding and offboarding processes.

Would you recommend Flowingly?

Matt believes “having processes automated in Flowingly would definitely help save time, paper, and resources that would otherwise be wasted on manual/paper procedures” for organisations like Kyvalley.

He also put specific emphasis on the shift towards working from home for many organisations, “the larger volume of people working remotely from home full-time would definitely be another reason to make the switch.”