Optimizing Financial Tracking Processes

Markem-Imaje was using multiple Excel spreadsheets, a SharePoint list, and thousands of emails between employees to provide managers and Finance Department personnel with the information they needed to track, approve, budget, forecast, and report on yearly capital expenditures. The status of capital expenditure requests was continually out of date, and there was no central repository of information or “source of truth” to reference or audit. As a result, the finance team spent more time collecting information than taking action on results.

With Markem-Imaje’s rapid growth and acquisitions came the challenge of efficiently tracking engineering and maintenance documentation for the packaging and processing lines in its manufacturing operations. By 2018, an internal survey of the Maintenance Team found that far too much time was spent searching for work instructions, and employees were too often unsure if they were working from the correct version of those instructions. With more than 4 million documents now under their purview, the Engineering Team needed a more efficient way to find, control, and monitor system changes across the enterprise.

Working with stakeholders from Finance, Operations, and IT, Aerie interviewed Markem-Imaje personnel and managers to build an understanding of the challenge, the technology available for a solution, the business process steps, and the Markem-Imaje roles involved.

Stepping through and documenting the existing business process, the Aerie team developed a clear understanding of Markem’s needs and created a mobile ready app to track all capital expense requests across the organization. Since a key challenge had been understanding the stages each request was in, the solution included a visual interface so the finance team could see at a glance the status of any open capital expense requests.

In addition to a visual representation of where each request is in the process, the new capital expenditure solution allows Markem-Imaje to modify and change request locations, cost centers, and approvers from any device or location. The Finance team now has a single access point for capital expense information and no longer has to independently track email conversations, Excel files, and SharePoint content to complete their work.