Digital Transformation: A Key to Decarbonization at First Philippine Holdings

First Philippine Holdings (FPH) is a pioneering holdings company established in 1961. It has a strong portfolio in clean and renewable energy, with principal interests in premium real estate, manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and education. FPH is committed to running its businesses successfully without compromising the environment. The company has over 10,000 employees and is headquartered in the Philippines. The company's mission is to forge collaborative pathways for a decarbonized and regenerative future.

First Philippine Holdings (FPH), a pioneering holdings company with a strong portfolio in clean and renewable energy, faced significant challenges in its operations due to manual processes. The approval workflows were manual, involving sifting through hundreds of emails, physical forms, and SAP data. This not only made the process time-consuming but also led to difficulties in tracking approval requests. Approval requests often got lost due to the lack of a centralized tracking tool. Furthermore, obtaining timely approvals from senior leaders was nearly impossible without a mobile workflow management application. The pandemic further highlighted the need for digitalization and minimizing the company's carbon footprint.

To address these challenges, Joseph Arnel Chavez, the Assistant Accounting Manager at FPH, initiated the search for a centralized workflow management tool for digitalization and streamlining approval workflows. After evaluating multiple tools, they chose Kissflow due to its ease of use, fair pricing, and familiarity among the senior management. Kissflow allowed FPH to go paperless, thereby achieving their goal of minimizing their carbon footprint. With Kissflow, FPH was able to digitize major operations, especially in their finance and accounts operations, without the need for developers or the IT team. They automated around 100 office processes, including accounts payable, billing, vendor accreditation, budget requests, contract reviews, and invoice processing with purchase orders. Kissflow's mobile app also facilitated timely approvals from senior leaders.

• The implementation of Kissflow brought about significant operational improvements at FPH. The company was able to digitize and automate their physical forms and workflows, reducing the exhaustive hours spent manually processing them. The challenge of losing approval requests was overcome with the centralized tracking tool. The mobile app facilitated timely approvals from senior leaders with just a few clicks. This improved operational and process efficiency, enhancing the way FPH serves its customers and vendors. The partnership with Kissflow also reaffirmed the relevance of FPH's mission of forging collaborative pathways for a decarbonized and regenerative future. Looking ahead, FPH plans to leverage Kissflow’s integrations to unify all the processes across the various tools they use and create visibility into the operations carried out by their vendors.

• Achieved 1,000+ monthly paperless approvals

• Automated over 100 manual processes

• Significant reduction in carbon footprint