Food & Beverage

Case Study

The Challenge

In order to maintain their high standards, Cobb employees frequently visit their customers, where they might receive customers’ compensation requests where there have been issues with stock.

As these meetings are often out in the field, employees usually would have to record all customer compensation claim details offline and bring them back to the office to enter onto the MS Access-based claim approval system, an inefficient process.

Although the system could send out e-mails to approvers, the approver could not approve the claims directly through the e-mail, resulting in approval records being held offline, outside of the system. This often lead to incomplete audit trails, making it very difficult to trace who approved what and when.

The Desired Outcome

Cobb needed a robust scalable solution that can be accessed via the internet to allow field staff to instantly submit customer compensation claims from wherever they are based, as long as they have an internet connection. The solution would ideally hold the data centrally in order for reporting to be available, and should support multiple levels of approval, for larger claims that might have to be escalated up to more senior employees.

The Solution

We developed a web-based system, whereby users can log into anywhere to submit and track customer claims. The application houses all compensation claims data in one central repository, showing customers, international exchange rates and approval levels. The web-based system also determines the correct approver for a claim and automatically sends them an e-mail, keeping a clear audit trail of this. Other relevant departments have read-only access for oversight.

Importantly, approvers can now choose to reject or approve directly from an email link, and an audit trail is kept of the approver and timestamp. This helps the Claims team to track every step of the approval process within the system.

The Impact

The web-based database has greatly refined workflow for Cobb, resulting in the following advantages:

• Easier than MS Access - an intuitive web-based UI allows staff to focus on doing their job instead of wrestling with out-dated technology.
• Accessible from anywhere - users around the world can access the system using any device that supports a modern browser and has an internet connection.
• Quicker turnaround time - the turnaround time for a claim is greatly reduced, leading to happier customers.
• Completely traceable - by allowing approvals to occur within the system, the audit trail is completely preserved, so no claim gets lost. Email reminders ensure that the right people are notified.