Speed-up Selection Operations During Purchase Order Creation
At ApprovalMax, we often hear things like: “The process of setting up was easy and enabled us to set up the approval flow in minutes!” and: “You can set it up in 5 minutes and the integration works a treat.” from our users.
This is largely down to the focus we place on overall User Experience (UX).
But it’s not solely about getting people up-and-running quickly. When they’re using the ApprovalMax platform, we want everything to be straightforward and intuitive, particularly when it comes to the execution of operations. The last thing we want is time being wasted waiting for a screen to load or a command to be completed.
After all, time is money.
And that’s why we’ve been working on an improvement to our UX that will help speed up a crucial part of the workflow: Purchase Order creation.
Improving a Recurrent Operation
Raising a PO is a recurrent operation, by which we mean a user may have to go through this operation several times a day, week, or month depending on the type of business and the size of the company.
It involves working with potentially very long lists of Suppliers and Purchase Items, some of which can exceed 50–100 items. This makes the selection of the required Supplier or Purchase Item during Purchase Order creation a lengthy and tedious process.
We wanted to find a better way to deal with this aspect of PO creation.
In short, we wanted to make it faster and easier.
And we did.
Here’s How It Works
We knew that cutting down the time required for the selection operations would provide a significant improvement to the user experience.
This led us to develop the following improvements:
- We made a change to the database structure by creating a dedicated NoSQL database for lists of suppliers and purchase items.
The lists are now pulled from Xero and stored in Approvalmax, immediately available for selection thanks to an optimized mechanism for storage and data retrieval. - And we utilized the ‘lazy loading’ technology – which defers the loading of an object until the point at which it is needed – to pull only small parts of the lists at a time.
This helps us minimize the time required for data upload and display, which works especially well for mobile Purchase Order creation.
Please note: This feature is currently available in beta and upon request. Contact support to switch it on.
Create POs Faster with ApprovalMax
Recurrent operations can feel repetitive, and having to spend longer than necessary on them is enough to make you want to tear your hair out.
With this latest UX improvement close to being ready, you’ll soon be able to race through your PO creation in no time at all, leaving your hair intact!
Why not give it a go today? To request the beta version of this feature enhancement, please contact support@approvalmax.com.
And if you’d like to find out more about ApprovalMax and its features, click here. Or if you’d like to try it out, sign up for your no-risk 30 day free trial here.