Audi Japan KK Executive Summary / Abstract At a certain point of business maturity, companies find it necessary to increase productivity and efficiency in order to stay ahead of industry standards. Audi Japan KK, importer of Audi vehicles and subsidiary of Audi AG, discovered that to reach operational efficiency it was necessary to gain more control and visibility over its core management and administrative processes. To fulfill this objective, the financial department decided to develop a BPM initiative within the organization that would revolutionize the operations of Audi Japan KK. A year ago, Audi Japan KK decided to begin the automation of several of their core back-end administrative processes within the financial department; processes that were found to be too manual and paper-based, which made them inefficient and difficult to manage. Audi Japan KK has a SAP system put in place to manage their financial operations and Bizagi was selected as the complementary BPM solution for process automation. They were also clear about getting a solution that was easy-to use, painless to implement and would automate everyday processes. The objective was to increase transparency and quality, and reducing reliance on paper-based trails and processes. This solution also needed to be replicable in other company departments and Audi subsidiaries around the world. Overview The BPM initiative at Audi Japan KK was conceived in the financial department, where processes were paper-based, executed manually and inefficiently managed. Processes included delicate and high level Requests for Approvals for a certain activity or spending purpose. Processes like this one would need to be approved by the President of the company whose availability is limited, and certainly, manual processes are not the best option to act quickly and flexibly. The Request for Approval (RFA) process was the first one to be automated at Audi Japan KK. The process covers the requests of almost 20 departments and divisions within the organization which are frequently requesting funds for different purposes and initiatives. A single request could often need more than 5 approvals from other supporting divisions and even from the sales department. Depending on the amount requested, the process needs different levels of approval. For smaller quantities it goes through the involved departments and divisions and finalizes with the approval of the Financial Controller. For larger quantities the request needs to be additionally approved by the Financial Director and the President of the company. There is a short version of the Request for Approval process (Management RFA) which has also been automated, this is similar to the previous process but between top management and controller only (no departments involved). Between these two processes the system is used by almost 100 users, however this number will certainly increase as the company is now launching to production 6 more processes this month: Overseas Trip approval, Domestic Trip approval, Personnel change approval, Purchase Order creation, Request for Payment (equivalent to accounts payable) and Budget Control Administration.