The Client
One of the largest Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Company with a heritage of over 80 years. Its products include food and beverages, cleaning agents, beauty and personal care products.
The Challenges
The major challenges in automating the process were:
- Given the enormous volume of data and the corresponding sensitivity, it became a challenge for the client to generate sales reports manually using different transformation logic and collaborating tools.
- It was a time-consuming process, prone to errors and required regulated data handling. Furthermore, data privacy and integrity were of the utmost importance.
- Since the Client was working in various time zones, they required 24 hrs support.
The Objective
Being a pioneer in the FMCG industry, the client has a broad range of products belonging to various categories. The Information and Analytics Department was responsible for gathering data from multiple sources on a daily basis and presenting comprehensive reports to the decision-makers regarding the market performance of their product lines. This entire report generation process was crucial yet monotonous and time-consuming. This further affected the decision-making process, due to human errors made while manually creating the report.
The client decided to build an application that would automate the comprehensive report generation process making the process efficient and accurate.
The Solution
- We introduced robotic process automation (RPA), to transform the reporting process by building bots that could handle rules-driven high-volume and high-value tasks with zero downtime.
- Software bots were developed in such a way that would perform extraction, transformation and output generation keeping in view that it meets all stakeholders’ requirements.
- The bots would collect the input data from various data sources like SAP, SharePoint, company websites, external websites, etc. This Input Data can be in form of an excel document, or PDF or text files.
- BOTs performed various set defined operations such as formula-based calculations, data-separation based on categories etc. on the input data to process it.
- Once the report was generated by the BOT, the outputs were parked in different destinations such as SharePoint, OneView and the path was shared with the respective stakeholder in an email. These outputs could also be shared as an attachment as per the client’s requirement.
- These bots fully automated the end-to-end reporting process, ran 24*7*365, providing an accurate and error-free report and reducing the monotonous work of business controllers significantly.
The Benefits
- The RPA solution implemented was able to save the client time, effort and improve overall business productivity by 50%.
- Reduced manual work by 80%.
- Reduced error rates by 90%.
- 24*7 support from the BOTs and the delivery timeline was improved significantly.
- Since the bot was processing the reports 100% accuracy achieved in reporting Sales figures.
- Availability of real-time data.
- Analysts can now contribute their valuable insights for effective decision-making.
