Azure Development Consultants LLC ("Azure") is a small-sized management consulting firm engaged in providing strategic guidance, operational support, and implementation assistance on public sector donor-funded reform projects.
As most of the projects run by Azure are funded by development aid and grants, the firm's spending and procurement is subject to a high degree of scrutiny. The firm needs to ensure that there is a clear and transparent trail of all expenditure and procurement, and provide well-documented rationale and justification for their purchases and spending.
Azure employs implementation professionals and teams that operate in the in the field, in different geographies and across countries. Teams need to set up local project offices and manage the up front and ongoing operating procurement.
Managing all the different procurement and the requisitions for items that flowed in on a day to day basis became challenging for the company. The company historically trained each and every team member on procurement protocols to ensure compliance with procedures, but over time this became increasingly time consuming and did not serve as a solution at scale.
The company needed to minimize the time and effort in its requisitioning and approval process so that teams could focus on delivery as consultants.
Azure needed to set up a system through which requisitions could be easily prepared according to a standard procedure, with each stage of the process clearly documented.
The company also needed a mechanism through which appropriate approvals could be taken without having to manually follow up with individuals.
Proqura's workflow and approvals mechanism provided an ideal low cost mechanism for Azure to run their requisition flows and automatically route requisitions to relevant individuals for approval according to a pre-defined structure.
The process flows were defined to be fully compliant with the company's internal policies and procedures as well as the donors' requirements. Thus, following the process flows within Proqura helped ensure overall compliance.
The audit log of the workflows helped to maintain regular, detailed documentation of each step of the process, with attached documents that could be easily referenced. This provided the complete transparency that was required on Azure's projects while maintaining minimal day to day oversight and overhead.