What’s New at MaintainX: April 2023

Automate Cost Control with New Purchase Order Approval Workflows

Purchase Orders are designed to bring accountability and structure to one of today’s most critical business objectives–cost control.

Effective PO management keeps your teams within budget, streamlines critical parts orders, and helps you track where your resources are going. But like many business processes, the idea is often better than the execution.

A study by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) revealed that manual PO processing can cost organizations as much as $506.52 per PO. Relying on paper or email can delay routine orders, as POs can hang around for days waiting for the right person to approve them. And that can result in longer downtime.

Costly errors also can slip through to vendors if you don’t properly vet POs.

Today, we introduced custom Purchase Order Approval Workflows on our Enterprise plan to help you control costs more efficiently. Now, in MaintainX, you can automate your approval process to save time, reduce the risk of misordering, and ensure you always have the parts you need to keep equipment running smoothly.

By defining your own conditions and actions, based on cost thresholds, order types, and more, you can get the flexibility you need for your Purchase Order process, without the overhead that comes with managing it manually.

This not only provides the peace of mind that comes with knowing your high-value or unconventional POs are getting the scrutiny they need. It also helps you get those lower-value or routine POs through the system faster to speed up your orders.

Working closely with our customers, we’ve built custom Purchase Order Approval Workflows to help you:

• Control costs by ensuring the right approvers control the right requests
• Save admin time by automating PO approval and the routing of POs to approvers
• Minimize downtime by streamlining the purchasing process for critical parts

Improve PO Control and Communication Workflows

Whether through maverick spending or human error, spiraling costs usually come down to a lack of control over the Purchase Orders being submitted and fulfilled.

Purchase Order Approval Workflows in MaintainX help you eliminate this scenario by:

• Mandating the approval of Purchase Orders by specific people or teams, based on conditions that you define
• Notifying specific people or teams of Purchase Orders that impact them

We’ve also introduced new notifications for the creators of POs to see when their POs have been approved or rejected. This streamlines communication from end to end, reducing any need for follow-up.

Customizable PO Workflows to Fit Your Existing Process

We’ve designed MaintainX to make complex processes simple.

Purchasing processes can differ a lot, even within one organization. You might have different approvers for each team, or handle POs differently based on cost. That’s why we’ve worked closely with our customers to develop customizable workflows that you can map to your existing processes.

Now, you can define how and who should approve POs, using cost thresholds, custom fields, and whether or not the PO includes a one-off part.

Examples of rules you could set up to streamline purchase management include:

• Requiring the plant manager’s approval for POs containing a one-off part
• Routing POs with a value of $10,000 or higher to the VP of Operations for approval
• Approving POs automatically if their value is less than $500 or fall under a specific purchase category (like refurbishment)

And, based on these conditions, MaintainX can either:

• Assign the PO to specific individuals or teams for approval
• Approve the PO automatically

To get a closer look at how Purchase Order Approval Workflows can help you control costs and drive operational efficiencies, book a demo today.