Hertz Car Rental was born in 1918, by the hand of Walter Jacobs, founder of the company. It is, nowadays, the largest car rental company because it has more than 10,000 stations worldwide and is present in 145 countries, from the six continents.
In 2019, Hertz Portugal had to optimize its internal processes to dematerialize all physical paper regarding the purchase process. We spoke with Hugo Sá, IT Director of Hertz Portugal, to understand how Arquiconsult’s solutions were able to help the company make the needed transition. “We looked in market for a company that would help us in this process, and we reached at Arquiconsult. They presented us with the Purchase Portal solution, a portal developed by Arquiconsult, integrated with ERP, which in our case is Dynamics NAV from Microsoft”, said the director.
The project started in mid-November 2019 expected to be completed in March 2020, however Covid 19 pandemic changed the plans initially outlined and led to the process being suspended. “The summer period is our peak business activity, so we decided to let this period go by and in the post-summer we started with the project. We were able to finish it in October 2020,” explained Hugo Sá.
Nowadays the process is much more agile and fast. The approval process circulates, people are physically in different places and buildings, and I don’t even mention remote work. In 2019, in our organization there was very little remote work, but we had employees relocated, because we have an organization spread throughout the country, and there are approval workflows that impact several people, who are in different places. Paper circulating, even if it scanned and was in PDF, photocopying, etc., took longer. Today, being on a digital platform, with the data completely already synchronized with our ERP, everything is more functional. What i mean by this is that while the paper typically did not leave our organization – I didn’t take invoices home to check, validate or approve – and nowadays I approve purchase invoices anywhere. Therefore, the processes have become much more agile and much faster the approval process. This was our starting point.
I have two visions: the user’s vision, because I am also a consumer of this solution, and the overall view from the strategic point of view and the digitization of processes and the elimination of paper, etc. In terms of organization, we are quite satisfied. It has radically transformed our procurement and invoice validation process. For example, there are notifications every day to users that end up speeding up the process. On the other hand, we can approve invoices and validate processes anywhere by accessing the software. In addition, we have something very important to us, nowadays we can easily access invoices from 6 or 8 months ago, something that was once in a file, today is accessible anywhere and by any director, and not only by financial area.
This agility of the processes made the company much more productive and effective. It is a project that impacts the organization in a transversal way, since virtually all areas are buyers. Thus, as main advantages I can highlight: the simplicity of information access, the agility in the purchasing processes, the versatility and I highlight the environmental component, because we minimize our ecological footprint. About 35,000 invoices that have already been processed on this portal in the last year.
It’s true that we started with a BI solution and the processes have always gone smoothly, they’ve never been a source of stress for the company. I recognize that all the interlocutors I have spoken to from Arquiconsult, whether they are more senior or not so much, have full knowledge of what they are doing. So, I have confidence in Arquiconsult’s work. The work we develop together is very related to ERP, which is where our financial information is, whether the BI part, has a very strong analysis on the financial part, whether this part of the purchases directly linked to the ERP. I have full confidence in working with Arquiconsult regarding information integrated into our ERP. I believe that it is a partnership of the future clearly and, moreover, we are already working on new projects.
Additional information about Purchase Portal, here!
