Enaex Africa, a world-class blasting services company, recently transformed its cost accounting management through automation with Nintex K2 Software, gaining 20 times more manhours and 100% accuracy in pricing and cost control across over 1100 product lines nearly 100 customers. 

Enaex Africa produces and distributes a wide variety of explosives and premium products across the entire blasting process for both opencast and underground mining, quarries, and civil construction, to the most prominent mining regions in Africa. 

Enaex Africa explains that in a market prone to commodity pricing fluctuations, they needed to have complete visibility and control of the company’s costing and pricing processes.   They were looking to achieve far more efficient, accurate and transparent cost management, and establish pricing controls appropriately in an ever-changing business climate. 

Maintaining control and accuracy of customer pricing had become more complex and time consuming as Enaex’s customer base grew and requirements changed more regularly.  Their costing and pricing solution needed automation to support monthly and annual price changes with the confidence that effectively managed the costing and pricing process.

They had longer and more complex internal processes which needed to change to keep up with their growth, and market demands and constraints. They also had to replace manual processes and spreadsheets with automation and predictable, efficient, and reliable costing and pricing processes. 

The solution, called Customer Price Letter Automation (CPLA) was developed for Enaex Africa by Linxus with Nintex K2 Five.  Linxus are Nintex partners based in South Africa, working globally on leading automation and process management solutions.  The scalability of the platform provides automation of monthly and annual customer price calculations for more than 1100 product lines across nearly 100 customers.  

Wilhelm Vermaas of Linxus describes CPLA further: “We used a set of user defined formulas which can be updated or added to by the administrator to allow Enaex Africa to customize the method by which pricing is calculated by the system, just as they would have in Microsoft Excel. The formulas use any system input parameter, covering material costs, fixed cost, variable costs, margins, discounts and even sales volumes.” 

By using Nintex K2 Five out of the box features, we were able to generate templatised price letters monthly, and annually, to ensure 100% accuracy before distribution to customers.  CPLA integrates into third party applications via a manual import / export using standard templates generated from the system.  Approvals are managed through Nintex K2 Five to establish new customers’ initial prices and are updated monthly and / or annually to reflect pricing changes, margins or discounts.  

Here are just some of the benefits that the company has reaped from CPLA: 

• Productivity: Time to produce pricing letters dropped from 80 hours to 4 hours – 20 times faster through automation.  Incremental benefits were realized by eliminating unnecessary back and forth, checking and manual validation of formula or outputs 
• Accuracy: Using standard formulas inside the K2 engine, pricing and therefore margin and profitability, is controlled from a central structured data source eliminating the risk of human error and ensuring 100% accuracy in every pricing letter.  
• Control: Permissions, authorisations and change control are mapped through audit trails and governed by access levels, eliminating pricing anomalies. 
• Reporting: Accessing structured data has empowered reporting for better cost management, providing total visibility for costing and pricing models and providing an audit trail across all data transactions. 
• Flexibility:   The low-code/no-code solution allows the team to make changes, create new formulas and maintain internally, mapping to cost management targets but adhering to internal governance requirements. 

If you’d like to learn more about the Linxus CPLA solution they developed for Enaex Africa, please reach out on our Contact Us form here.