Case Study: Ferrari North America

• Custom application development and integration with existing general ledger application

• Clear understanding of unique procurement challenges

• Conducted user acceptance testing to streamline onboarding

To make the right recommendation, Ricoh first needed to fully understand Ferrari North America’s business challenges to define how automation could be achieved through better purchase order request workflow. For example, what approval gates were needed? What dollar amount thresholds could be approved? The Ricoh team also needed to understand how to extract information or place information into another general ledger line of business application, Masterpiece®.

Ricoh worked with Ferrari North America and representatives from Masterpiece to develop a clear picture of what needed to be done. They presented their solution to Ferrari North America—leveraging the company’s existing SharePoint intranet portal to build an automated purchase order request workflow.

“From a development standpoint, Ricoh really understood the technology aspects of what we needed— dropdowns of all our suppliers, cost centers and key data,” said Grissom. “They also understood what we didn’t need because we weren’t going to be using this application for the next 10 years.

”With full buy-in from Ferrari North America, Ricoh proceeded to create the automated purchase order request workflow. They developed the custom application and conducted user acceptance testing. After successful user testing, Ricoh then went into full production of the application and finished with stabilization so the application could be maintained.

Once up and running Ferrari North America’s new purchase order request workflow pulled suppliers and account data directly from Masterpiece so authorized employees could automatically generate purchase order requests. Through the application, the purchase orders were routed to a requestor’s manager, the controller and Grissom for approval and then saved to the Masterpiece shared folder. Once a purchase order request was approved, the requestor received an email along with a unique purchase order number.

If a new supplier needed to be added, the application automatically routed a request to the requestor’s manager and the controller for approval. If approved, it was then sent to accounts payable to create a new Masterpiece vendor ID, which was then imported daily to the portal so purchase orders could be generated. The requestor automatically received an email notification if the request was rejected. In turn, they were notified via email after an approved request received an ID number.

“The application worked really well and we saw the benefits from using it,” said Grissom. “It gave us absolute accountability for our business groups in terms of what they were requesting and why. They were no longer bringing us manual purchase orders that were difficult to track.”