"Success often comes from finding the right solution to solve the right business challenge and customer success is the true testimonial to having found the right solution for that business challenge."
Gidu Sriram, director of IT for product development systems and systems integration at Hyster-Yale, has been with the group for about 24 years. Hyster-Yale is a large manufacturer of forklifters materials handling equipment. We have a global presence around the world. Adam Korzeniowski is VP of Sales for Evoke Technologies. Evoke Technologies is a global systems integrator and a premier partner for Bonitasoft.
What was the situation that led you to look for a new BPM solution?
The previous BPM platform was an overkill for our business needs. The infrastructure footprint was quite large and complex to manage. To carry out our business processes all we needed was something that would handle sequential as well as the parallel review and approval tasks with some escalations if people didn’t act on their task in their inbox, we needed some way to remind us, and we also needed the capability to do out-of-office delegations so that when someone is gone tasks can be approved by people to whom it has been delegated. Our volume was also not very large and we process roughly 600-700 engineering changes in a month.
Can you tell us a little bit about the reasons you chose Bonita?
On top of these, annual support costs were increasing quite a bit and we needed a simpler and affordable BPM platform to continue our processes. We considered even creating a tool ourselves but the BPM consultant that we were working with recommended against doing that. We started looking for a solution that is a lot simpler and easier to manage. Most importantly I was actually looking for a solution that could be managed by a third party partner as a managed service. Our search led to Bonitasoft which is an open source tool which intrigued us. We pursued it and ended up with that tool.
How are you using the Bonita platform today?
The first big process that we converted over from the previous platform was the Change Order Release process, and that was the biggest process in our engineering group because almost all the engineers and the managers are involved in releasing their engineering changes to the rest of the company. We went live with the Change Order Release process in October. Then after that we started working on our second process, which is the Excess and Obsolete Inventory process, to get rid of excess inventory from the plant.
What are the benefits you are seeing now that you are using Bonita?
Due to the neglect of the previous BPM platform, every day we had many failed tasks. The system administrator had to manually monitor and restart them to keep them going. With the implementation of Bonita BPM those problems went away overnight.
What was the value brought to the project by the Bonitasoft partner?
Evoke Technologies played a huge role in getting us to the Bonitasoft platform. We’d earlier started working with a different consultant and they let us down big time because they were not experienced with the product. Evoke contacted us and after initial discussions we were quite impressed with Evoke and what they could offer and I asked them to do it over. Of course in hindsight I wish I’d known about Evoke a few months ahead but once they came in, the project came back on track and we were able to get our processes implemented.
From the partner perspective, what are you seeing now that Hyster-Yale is using Bonita?
I think it was a perfect technology decision as well as a business decision to select Bonitasoft as a platform, to use from a business point of view, for a low-volume type of transaction it provides a cost-effective solution. From a technology point of view, it allowed them to simplify their infrastructure footprint to implement, or reimplement, an existing solution that worked better than the previous implementation.
Additionally, having selected a low-code environment to implement this process allowed the customer to move into production on an expedited basis. The first process was released in four months from start to finish.
What is the value of being a Bonitasoft partner?
I believe there are great benefits for both Evoke Technologies and our customers equally. We are always seeking to derive the highest ROI to our customers and having an option to offer both a cost-effective solution as well as a platform that has a small technology footprint helps our customers go to production much faster. I believe that from the beginning of the project to production release took only four months, giving our customer the ability to reap the benefits of the solution that much faster. Equally, the partnership between Evoke Technologies and Bonitasoft helps us expand our global footprint and helps us target new markets.
What can you add about Hyster-Yale’s success?
Success often comes from finding the right solution to solve the right business challenge and customer success is the true testimonial to having found the right solution for that business challenge. I think here at Hyster-Yale Bonitasoft was the right solution and Evoke Technologies was the right partner to help deliver that solution.