Electronic Forms Smart Purchasing

As employees of this computer hardware firm spend money, they save money and time with an electronic requisition form.

February 1997
BY KATHERINE L. HOUSE

It's no one's favorite task. Filling out a purchase requisition form is about as much fun as completing an expense report and ranks just ahead of a tongue-lashing from the boss. Besides, in a large corporation, the routing and approval process can stretch over days, even weeks. In 1995, Patsy Nicklin, MIS manager of a Silicon Valley computer disk drive manufacturer, saw a demo of an electronic purchase requisition form put on by SigForms Inc. Right away, she knew her firm needed one. She hired the San Jose, Calif., distributorship to help her convert a 3-part 11-5/8 x 8-1/2-inch unit set requisition into an electronic form.

Creating an E-form
The disk drive manufacturer's requisition system suffered in much the same way as others. Employees occasionally supplied incorrect or incomplete information. Paper forms sometimes got lost in a supervisor's in-box, delaying approval. With employees spread out in several buildings, "sneaker-netting" was required to route the form. There was no way to track the progress of the paper form through the organization.

Once in purchasing, forms had to be checked carefully to ensure that calculations were accurate and approvals complete. With four buyers handling a few hundred requisitions each day, items sometimes were requisitioned without necessary approvals, says Nicklin. Without proper approvals and an adequate tracking system, cost overruns occurred. Assignment of incorrect account numbers resulted in extra work for the accounting department at the end of each month when purchases had to be reassigned to the appropriate account. Although purchasers were supposed to keep a copy of the requisition form as a reference, they rarely did, says Nicklin. Therefore, checking the status of an order turned into a frustrating and time-consuming search since no one knew the p.o.'s requisition number.

Officials at SigForms, a reseller for several electronic forms vendors, used JetForm Design to create a simple, easy-to-use form. "Unless it's simple, users won't do it," says Frank Balistreri, SigForms president. He founded the distributorship in 1986 at age 29 after careers at Apple and Moore Corp. SigForms designed the e-form and helped the client create related Microsoft Access data bases. The firm also sold approximately 120 licenses of JetForm Filler for the client's heaviest purchasers, installed the e-form and helped train employees in using it. The form is routed and approved electronically over the manufacturer's existing cc:Mail e-mail system.

"The real value [of this electronic form] to end users is they get what they request back sooner," says Balistreri. "And, it's also easier to fill out." Users can store a completed version of the electronic requisition form for a common product they order frequently. This way, they can call up the form every month and change only a few fields, saving considerable time.

Basic Features

• When users call up the Request for Purchasing Action form on their PCs, a requisition number has been entered automatically into a sequential number field. During the design process, the end user simply told SigForms what the starting number should be, just as they told their vendor this information when ordering paper requisition forms. This prevents users or purchasing from assigning the same number to two different requisitions and provides a tracking mechanism.
  
  
• Users must enter an actual date in the Date Needed field; otherwise an error message appears. The Date Needed field is a validation field, meaning SigForms officials built intelligence into the form so it could check the type of data being entered. This is a simple feature, yet is one of the most popular with the client's purchasing department, says Balistreri. Purchasers constantly wrote "ASAP" on their requisition forms next to the date needed, which the e-form prevents them from doing.
  
  
• The computer automatically fills in the requisition date field by checking the system date in the computer.
  
  
• Just as spreadsheet software can perform mathematical calculations, so can electronic forms. Calculation fields perform the multiplication required for the Estimated Extension field (quantity times estimated unit price) for each line item. The electronic form also calculates a total, saving users from doing the math and reducing errors.
  
  
• Electronic forms can incorporate pull-down menus to simplify completion and prevent errors. The unit of measure field has a drop-down pick list (menu) allowing users to choose such things as "hundred" or "dozen." Then the abbreviation for the unit of measure is entered into the form to save space, according to Jeff Scott, SigForms' manager of technical services. With the pick list, users need not know all the abbreviations for items, such as "dz" for dozen.

The Complex Stuff
When employees open the Request for Purchasing Action form, the cursor automatically appears in the Badge No. field at the top of the form. SigForms made this a mandatory field; if employees do not fill in a legitimate ID number, an error message appears. This is accomplished with a query to a Microsoft Access data base, meaning that by using a short SQL programming statement, SigForms employees have the form automatically verify the authenticity of the ID number. The data base lists the badge numbers of all employees authorized to complete purchase requisitions.

As in designing a paper form, SigForms employees had many choices to make when creating this electronic form. For example, purchasers must fill in a field labeled "Requester." However, the Access data base containing ID numbers could have been designed to include employee names. Then, the Requester field would automatically populate (be filled in) once an ID number was entered. The same is true of the manual fields involving supplier name and address. Pull-down menus could have been used in the Recommended Supplier field to allow users to select a favored supplier. However, Nicklin says this would not have been practical for her employer, which uses thousands of vendors.

Routing and Tracking
Purchasers "sign" the form to indicate it is completed and ready to be routed by typing in their e-mail password. The form is then sent by e-mail to the appropriate person. The hardest part about designing the purchase requisition was figuring out how to handle the routing, says Mike Balistreri, vice president of product development and applications for SigForms. To accomplish this, officials had to learn about the manufacturer's purchasing policies.

The same data base that contains employee ID numbers also includes their names, the names of their supervisors and details about the dollar amount each person can authorize. If an employee has no purchasing authority, his form is automatically routed to his manager. Then, depending on the total dollar value of the purchase requisition, the form may be routed to yet another manager. If purchasers indicate in a field at the top of the form that their purchase is a capital asset purchase, the form is routed differently than for typical requests. The client's accounting department reviews purchases greater than a preset dollar amount. Accounting officials can change the account number if necessary, preventing tedious end-of-the-month journal entries to correct mistakes. After accounting signs off on the form, the Account Number field locks, preventing future changes.

To employees at the disk drive manufacturer, the beauty of this electronic form is its ability to be tracked throughout the organization. At any time, users can call up a separate tracking form, also developed by SigForms. By entering a requisition number, they can see the date and time the form was received and sent by various people within the organization.

Future Plans
Officials at the disk drive manufacturer have expressed interest in updating the e-form. Currently, the purchasing department enters the price, the supplier name and several other details into its own software system. Officials would like to create a link between their system and the e-form to eliminate double data entry. The client also wants to extract data from the electronic requisition to create an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would report expenses by employee and department. The disk drive manufacturer plans to roll out the electronic requisition form to its overseas production plant and to the rest of the employees at its California headquarters soon. (Initially only the heaviest purchasers got to use the form.) The last phase will be to link the e-form to an existing data base of vendors, allowing users to get a list of vendor product codes once they enter the vendor name.

Katherine L. House is managing editor of FORM Magazine.

Company Capsule
Name: SigForms Inc., San Jose, Calif.
Year Founded: 1986

BACKGROUND: SigForms President Frank Balistreri was employee No. 142 at Apple Computer, Cupertino, Calif., where he assisted in the development of Apple's first service and parts department. He also worked in sales and as a data systems coordinator for Moore in San Jose, Calif., where he developed marketing agreements with major software companies.

Quote: "We have a vision of what the forms company of the future looks like, and we're filling in that profile," says Frank Balistreri. Although the company name still says forms, Balistreri views the distributorship as "a software company specializing in electronic forms for the paperless process."

Number of Employees: 18, including two full-time programmers and several technical salespeople. SigForms also works with a number of international partners and resellers.

Claim to Fame: A partnership with Lotus. SigForms designed the basic forms that ship with Lotus' cc:Mail electronic mail package. From SigForms' Web site, cc:Mail users can download additional e-forms.

Products and Services: SigForms started out selling software-compatible forms that work with high-end software packages. The distributorship sold its first electronic form in 1992, a print-on-demand solution that eliminated preprinted forms. Today, the firm is a reseller for JetForm, Delrina and F3 Software. In addition, SigForms sells several types of back-end print-on-demand solutions, including Fantasia and JetForm Server. The majority of the firm's e-forms sales are in back-end solutions, but Balistreri sums up the market this way: "The glory is in the front-end, and the bucks are in the back-end." Balistreri estimates that 60 percent of fiscal 1997 sales will be in printing; the balance will be in paperless high-tech solutions. By the year 2000, he estimates that 90 percent of the company's sales will be e-forms solutions.

About Electronic Forms
Electronic forms, often called e-forms, are templates in a digital format with fields to input variable information. They often look similar to paper forms, but they appear on a computer screen. They are created once with an e-forms design package and used over and over on a computer. These forms can then be filled in and routed electronically via electronic mail. E-forms can utilize pull-down menus to simplify completion and reduce errors. They also can provide directions to users with help fields and perform calculations, such as summing costs on an expense report. Simple programming can be used to link e-forms to data bases to verify information or fill in fields automatically. Such intelligent electronic forms are known as front-end solutions.

Some software packages can convert existing paper forms into electronic ones using optical character recognition technology. Back-end e-forms solutions store predesigned forms electronically and merge them with variable data, including company logos, when printed. Both types of electronic forms eliminate preprinted forms.

Tips for Selling Electronic Forms Start with a basic form. Frank Balistreri, president of SigForms Inc., says the most popular applications for intelligent electronic forms are purchase requisitions, expense reports, time cards and vacation requests. Embrace electronic forms within your organization. In other words, live it, love it, breathe it. Balistreri can't think of a printed form his company uses. Officials have developed electronic forms for such tasks as vacation slips and expense reports. Salespeople even fill out an electronic Customer Profile form to gather information needed to design clients' e-forms. Prepare for a longer selling cycle. This is due in part to the capital expense involved. Patsy Nicklin, MIS manager for the company profiled in the main article, says the purchase requisition project was delayed by about six months initially because of the poor business climate in her employer's industry. The pilot phase was further delayed because she traveled overseas extensively for a period of time. Client software and hardware can be a hurdle, too. Although the disk drive manufacturer had an e-mail system in place that allowed tracking and routing of the form, Nicklin was forced to upgrade several older PCs that weren't powerful enough to handle the electronic form. Understand the high-tech world in general. Employees of SigForms use several different types of software in day-to-day operations, including ABC FlowCharter software to do workflow analysis and Lotus Notes. Sales reps use sophisticated laptops, and employees have used e-mail for four years. The company has a T1 high-speed connection to the Internet and a T1 connection between its two nearby office buildings. At one point, employees joked that the firm had more computer servers than employees. Keep it simple. The easier an electronic form is to use, the greater acceptance it will have. Frank Balistreri tested out the e-forms that ship with cc:Mail on children under the age of 10. Capitalize on your success. Other disk drive manufacturers have called SigForms about developing an electronic requisition form after hearing about the successful installation at Nicklin's company.