The Client
The client is a leading healthcare and wellness product manufacturing giant specialized in therapeutics, personal care, baby care, nutrition and animal health, with a global presence in more than 100 countries.
The Challenges
Data maintenance in ERP system across various processes like Bill of Material Creation, Sales Transactions, Purchase Order Creation, Material Creation, etc. and generating product-related reports from multiple sources was quite mundane. These processes involved multiple steps making them time-consuming. Thus, the client had to utilize many resources for performing the activities.
Large volume of data & payment files, followed by manual transaction validation would make the processes time-consuming and expose the business to error and financial risks. The erroneous data could also affect orders, deliveries, payment and ultimately bottom-line profitability.
Hence, to have a timely data collection, processing and analysis, along with accurate report generation and improved overall operational efficiency, the client desired to automate the complete data maintenance process using Robotic process Automation (RPA).
The major challenges involved in automating this process were:
- Dealing with multiple files and huge volumes of data generated on a daily & monthly basis.
- Multiple conditions for report generation and data updation made the process critical.
- Pre-condition check prior to report generation and change of process flow based on pre-condition decision.
- Extracting multiple reports from multiple sources and consolidating files dynamically.
The Objective
The client, a leading pharmaceutical company dealt with huge amount of data and tedious and time-consuming daily activities urged minimal human intervention. Data maintenance and Report generation, collectively, accounted for their daily business operations and evidence-based decision making demanded automation.
The client desired to be competitive in the market and through automation, it was desired to unmanned labor-intensive tasks while providing seamless and error-free data processing, cost reduction and drive value.
The Solution
JK Tech team evaluated the “as-is” process end-to-end and recommended an optimized workflow. The RPA based solution was designed to derive process efficiency.
To automate the process, the following steps were performed by the bot:
- For report generation, a software bot was scheduled to launch a dedicated URL and log in to the portal.
- Post logging into the portal, the bot would navigate various tabs to select reports in scope.
- The bot would then generate the required reports, perform various validations, downloads and consolidate them and then send them to relevant client stakeholders as email attachments.
- For data maintenance, the bot would get all the required input from users, extract the relevant information, log in to the ERP system, navigate to various pages and update them. Once all the processes are completed, the bot sends out a confirmation email back to the right stakeholders.
The solution automated numerous manual and repetitive steps in the process thereby eliminating manual errors. The huge volume of data was managed and fixed efficiently and accurately by the bot. The automation helped the client save a lot of time and utilize their resources to focus more on strategic and value-added tasks. Furthermore, the software bot could enter and extend finished goods, semi-finished goods and input materials in a cohesive manner keeping the master data always in sync with transactional data.
SAP Automation:
Web Process Automation:
The Benefits
- Turnaround Time Reduction – Turn around time of report generation was reduced by 75%. Earlier each single report generation was taking ~20 mins to get generated while with automation, the same is done within 5 mins. Similarly, while each task of data entry in ERP was taking approximately 10 mins to get completed, with the help of automation, the same task is done within 2-3 mins helping the client gain efficiency and productivity by ~80%.
- Accuracy – Bot acted exactly as per the business rules with all the actions with 100% accuracy.
- Cost and Resource Reduction – Software bots helped in reducing manual intervention as well as cost savings. Around 5 FTEs contribute to business strategic work, more.
