Thanks to a fruitful cooperation in 2022, Fluenta modules helped reform the entire system of procurement processes at Audax Renewables. We talked to Henrietta Nemes, buyer at Audax Renewables—who has taken an active part in the implementation process—about this enormous change, and the challenges and successes it entails.
What were the issues you needed solutions for that you felt Fluenta could help you with?
Henrietta Nemes: When E.ON Hungary sold E.ON Energy Trade, our organization was completely transformed, we became a much smaller company than before. After the separation, there were some services that we still received through our TSA with E.ON, such as HR, finances, and procurement.
We had to part ways with these, for which we were given a definite deadline of September 2022. However, in the meantime, we started the implementation of Fluenta, and thanks to this, we achieved complete separation earlier than projected.
For 2022, our goal was to introduce and establish a comprehensive purchasing system that houses the processes we have created, that our own buyers can work in, and everything is based on our own needs. The main consideration for this new system was to provide the same functions SAP did. In the end, we found everything we were looking for, in Fluenta, and we’re very happy about it to this day.
So, it was the separation and transfer to the Spanish parent company that resulted in Audax having its own purchasing department?
H.N.: Yes, absolutely. This was a great opportunity to re-evaluate our processes. We were sure that we didn’t want to operate the same way we had before; we wanted to tailor our procurements to ourselves, our own needs.
We knew it at the very beginning, when we were still operating based on our old processes that we weren’t the same-sized company as before; many processes became superfluous, it didn’t make sense to go forward on the same path, and over-regulation is not necessarily beneficial for a smaller business.
We wanted everything to be proportionate to our size and suitable for our organizational structure, so we reworked our processes. I’d like to add that the Spanish parent company has given us free rein in this regard, which has been a great help.
Did you request offers from other companies during the selection process?
H.N.: Of course, we approached other businesses. With each of them, we ran into the problem that their product would’ve solved certain problems, included certain features, but at some point, we would’ve had to use SAP again, which we wanted to completely replace in our procurement processes. It was another attractive feature about Fluenta that it’s capable of interfacing, so if we decided we wanted to connect it to SAP—which our accounting still uses—, we could.
What are the new processes Fluenta has brought along?
H.N.: We’ve reworked our purchasing so that it’s tailored to our current, smaller organization. We wanted requisitions to start from where the requests arise. We’ve redefined who can approve what and up to what amount, where the decision points are, where even the CEO might have to be included because of the scale of the spending.
This way we’ve also succeeded in relieving managers of the burden of having to make decisions on smaller purchases. This is important because when we became a smaller company, a flatter organization, a lot of the decisions were left to the CEO, which is obviously not sustainable in the long term.
I think that these processes were successful. Of course, there are some points where we’ll have to change things in the future, but we’re constantly working on these.
What kind of supplier feedback have you received about the implementation?
H.N.: Luckily, we haven’t experienced any difficulties there. Sometimes we had to help our suppliers a little with the use of the system, but they’ve received it well; we constantly get positive feedback on how much they like it.
I even have a very educational story about this. At a meeting with a supplier, we indicated that we had made a support request but hadn’t received a response. That’s when we thought of creating a supplier profile for them in Fluenta, where they could reply to our requests, and we could even measure whether they responded in time and fulfilled their commitments.
Also, if there were any delays, they could change deadlines in the system themselves, which means we can calculate with these, too. They were very happy about this solution, and it was a positive experience for us, too, that we managed to resolve the problem so easily.
What were the greatest challenges in switching to the new system?
H.N.: Currently, our greatest difficulty lies within the constant changes in the organization; there’s even more restructuring to come. Unfortunately, there have also been a lot of personnel changes recently, which we’ve also had to overcome; we even changed directors, which also meant a lot of difficulties. In the meantime, we’ve also got a sister company; at first, they said they didn’t want to use Fluenta, but then they ended up requesting it, so we had to manage that, too.
We were also worried about how the colleagues would receive this change. After all, everyone reacts differently to transformations that permeate the whole organization. Our aim was to avoid off-the-books purchases and to be able to produce comprehensive reports, but we can only get this data from a system that covers everything.
How did you overcome these difficulties?
H.N.: It was about baby steps. We introduced Fluenta into our daily operation module by module. This way we only had to work with a few colleagues at a time, so we only needed to convince and reassure a small portion of people that they would benefit from the change.
Sometimes personnel changes were an advantage in this respect as newcomers would get used to the new system instead of the old. Another thing that helped a lot in adopting the system was that we looked for solutions to every problem, we didn’t abandon our colleagues, we sat down with them to discuss what “hurts” them in relation to a particular process. I personally have great faith in communication, which helped a lot. And we also benefited from the fact that several of our colleagues were very enthusiastic about the system, they became fond of it, and they were happy to promote it to others in the company.
When we really hit a snag, I initiated a meeting with the manager and those who had an issue with the system. Fortunately, such cases have been very rare.
More than that, some colleagues were positively relieved when they heard about Fluenta; for example, those who had to wrestle with mountains of emails and Excel spreadsheets before the introduction of the Invoice module, or whose internal processes consisted of managing linked folders and other files, which was definitely not user-friendly. Since the introduction of Fluenta, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from the users about how much more convenient the approval process has become.
How was your experience with the implementation process?
H.N.: Most of the colleagues were absolutely supportive about the implementation of the system, they were very happy about it. Our Data Protection Officer was the most pleased with the Compliance module and was very active and happy to participate in its implementation.
The Fluenta team was very helpful; after the meeting on SAP integration (in which both Fluenta and SAP representatives took part), those colleagues who’d only worked with SAP development commented on how cool the Fluenta team was [laughs].
I only have positive things to say about the Fluenta team, they were very cooperative, they wanted to understand our issues and what we want solutions for. People who were part of other projects and got involved in our implementation process always said afterwards how good it was for us to work with such a collaborative, open-minded team who were always looking for and bringing solutions to problems. Obviously, we couldn’t cover everything 100% yet, there are a few things we might improve in the future, but that’s natural.
Which business workflows would you say have been revolutionized by the Fluenta modules?
H.N.: Req2Pay is definitely very useful for us. Office purchasing used to work by opening an Excel catalogue, copying out what you wanted and sending it to the assistant, who would start the procurement process for it. There was a short period when we didn’t have SAP anymore, but we hadn’t started using Fluenta yet, which was very painful for the Purchasing Department. Of course, we’d tried to prepare for this period and order things in advance, but you can’t prepare for everything like that. There was a point then where we felt that everyone just ordered whatever they wanted. This was what we really had to cut down on, and we succeeded in doing that with Fluenta.
The Contract module helped to put our contracts in order. These had previously been saved here and there, but now we managed to round them all up and we can store them in one place in the system.
I believe that the Workflow module will achieve similar success among the managers; I hope this will be the next big step.
Do you think monitoring cross-module processes in Fluenta works well at Audax?
H.N.: Not yet, we’re still working on that part. I’d project a 3-5-year development period for this, but luckily, our managers approach the question with an open mind. This is very important; we couldn’t have completed the project without such attitudes.