Solution

Tanay Tiwary, Global Head of Digitization and Business Improvement at Puma Energy, and his team are responsible for improving operational efficiency and meeting the digitization requirements that their customers and suppliers expect from them. He shared that Puma realized the need for a low-code platform like Kissflow for digital transformation at the beginning of COVID. 

“We brought in Kissflow, at the end of 2019 or the start of 2020. And from March 2020 onwards, everything shut down. With COVID, suddenly, everyone was working from home and not in offices. Our industry (aviation and retail) was one of the biggest hits. Everything almost came to a standstill. And many of our operations that were dependent on us working next to each other started getting delayed or unexecutable at times.” 

Tanay added that it was a challenging period for Puma Energy, where they struggled to sustain as an organization. However, this difficult situation made the need for digital collaboration and process orchestration evident. This was when their pilot program of 200 users in Kissflow suddenly started increasing in scale. “It was accidental that we were rightly placed at that time to take a platform that has great features and value for money and start scaling it up.” Today, Puma Energy has over 1,500 users in Kissflow.

He attributed this scalability to the simplicity of Kissflow. He said, “Small things, such as the call-to-action being very visible as a new item, are important because they reduce the time for training and help with change management. Kissflow allows us to bring things which were initially complicated, such as developing large workflows through a simple drag/drop model for us.” 

While talking about Kissflow’s impact on work, Tanay mentioned that Kissflow helped break the distance barrier that often caused delays in decision-making. Being an agile MNC, decisions needed to be made quickly. With Kissflow, all the information was easily accessible to all the leaders managing Puma’s various offices, thus enabling them to make fast decisions and improve efficiency.

Ever since implementing Kissflow, Puma Energy has been doubling down on digital transformation efforts. “We still see that we are not going back to the paper way of working. We like this new way of working, and we continue doubling down on it. And I think that is what we will see for most organizations that they will use platforms like Kissflow for certain needs and before they realize it’s solving for many other needs that were not initially the target.”

He added that rather than manually entering numbers from documents, teams at Puma have automated this with Kissflow’s smart attachments and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Now, they add value by ensuring that the systems that are automating their operations are working efficiently because what’s meant for a machine should be done by a machine. 

He mentioned that owing to Kissflow’s intuitive interface and user-friendliness, business users have started getting excited about the ideas they're pitching and are building these solutions themselves. “You are able to utilize the business language, which is actually English or Spanish to code. You don't need to learn how to do this on .net or C++ anymore.”

With Kissflow, Puma Energy could digitize, automate, and improve the efficiency of some core operations, such as:

• Fuel Onboarding

• Airplane Refueling Request

• Agreement Management

• Accounts Payable

• CAPEX

• OPEX

Another key area that Kissflow is helping Puma Energy is supplier management. What used to be managed haphazardly via emails is now managed with the supplier portal that enables suppliers to quickly access the information that they need, such as purchase orders, invoices, status of payments, and so on. 

When asked about the organization’s goals and how Kissflow is contributing to achieving them, Tanay said, “Safety is key for us, and so is operational excellence. Both go hand in hand. And where Kissflow is now helping us is focusing on this area, which in most companies has remained on paper, which is permits to work or many of these operational checks and balances that need to be there before you approve something for execution.”