Photo of Steven Ong, UOB and Louis Khoo, Kimly Construction Pte Ltd.

Doxa delivers digital P2P solution for Singapore construction company

The challenge

Kimly Construction Private Limited (Kimly) had to deal with mountains of paperwork and engage concurrently with multiple stakeholders on multiple projects.

Before the automation of the company’s procure-to-pay (P2P) processes were implemented, Kimly would manually process the transactions with its stakeholders, such as suppliers, sub-contractors, service providers and financial institutions. This manual process was fragmented, comprising many activities including but not limited to, email, telephone calls, fax, hand deliveries, upload/download, manual input and printing, physical storage, retrieval of data and paper documents. Such processes were time consuming, error prone and manpower dependent.

These monotonous and tedious tasks had become more challenging, impacting operating costs in the long term.

The solution

Kimly selected Doxa’s solution¹ to automate it’s procure-to-pay processes and integrate with its accounting system. With UOB working in collaboration with Doxa, Kimly no longer needed to submit paper applications for its trade financing. Leveraging the existing digital data available on Doxa’s procure-to-pay platform, UOB facilitates Kimly’s application for green trade financing through the platform. This collaboration plays an important role to accelerate the development of Kimly’s plan to automate and digitalise their processes. In turn, this will help Kimly to reduce manpower costs, boost productivity and achieve process efficiencies in the long term.

Best practice and innovation

Streamlined processes – by consolidating the activities and transactions with various stakeholders, instead of handling them in a fragmented way, Kimly communicates with its stakeholders and processes transactions on a single platform. This helps prevent duplication of data from manual entry, minimises errors, speeds up the processing and improves the transparency of transactions at each stage.

Efficient use of resources – instead of processing, resources are now channelled to value-added tasks such as analysis, audit, KPI tracking, benchmarking and effective sourcing.

Visibility of transactions – data from various stakeholders is now uploaded onto a single platform. This allows users to have better visibility on the data available while ensuring the reliability and consistency of the data. With real-time data updates, built-in communication features and audit trails recorded for each action, there are less disputes between internal and external stakeholders. This promotes a greater sense of ownership over their respective transactions by each stakeholder.

Cost Savings – in the midterm, Kimly estimates a measurable reduction of its back-end manpower costs by 30% to 40%. In the long-term, Kimly foresees improved efficiency and productivity with the improvement in staff well-being. This helps to reduce staff training and hiring costs.

This is the first green and sustainable trade finance transaction executed on a digital platform which involved the collaboration of three parties, namely UOB, Kimly and Doxa.

Key benefits

• Cost savings.
• Headcount savings.
• Process efficiencies.
• Increased automation.
• Risk mitigated.
• Improved visibility.
• Errors reduced.
• Manual intervention reduced.
• Increased system connectivity.
• Future proof solution.

Mr Louis Khoo, Director, Kimly Construction, says, “We have always wanted to automate and digitalise our procure-to-pay and trade financing processes. By collaborating with UOB and Doxa, we have accelerated our development of the end-to-end automation and digitalisation of our processes. We believe with Doxa’s trade financing module, it will help us in reducing manpower cost and boost productivity and achieve process efficiency in the long term.”