The Client

An international group of companies that manufacture and install industrial doors. Their main goals when applying RPA solutions were improving process quality and efficiency, as well as having their employees focus on more value-adding activities.

The RPA journey – one step at a time

When we approached the Client, they were in the middle of huge internal IT projects and had no resources whatsoever to assign to RPA. Nevertheless, they were still very interested and as we talked about the benefits RPA can bring to their business, they wanted to try it out right away.

We thus suggested starting with a small-scale deployment and doing that in the F&A department. While the payback time may be a little longer with those kinds of processes, but it is obvious that this is one of the areas that suffer the most because of mundane and boring manual tasks that take a lot of time to complete.

We have successfully identified multiple processes that could be automated in the whole group, reviewed them and created a scalable and easy-to-use framework for generating financial statements and reports, updating files, handling supplier invoices, etc.

Completely outsourcing the RPA CoE

With the existing IT projects that the Client was running at the time, there were no chances that they could potentially have an RPA Center of Excellence internally, even though it is an extremely important part of a successful RPA journey. However, we maintain constant communication and support to the Client, having both business analysts, process improvement consultants and RPA developers at our disposal. The only pieces of the puzzle that we are missing are IT infrastructure and local subject matter experts that are not fixed and instead change with every project we handle.

We have thus successfully enabled the RPA journey for our Client without them having to assign any fixed resources to the initiative, which was crucial during their daily challenges at the time.

A different kind of savings

Even though the F&A department is usually considered as a cost center, instead of a business driver, this was not the case with the current Client. There was no intention of cutting cost by replacing employees with robots. Instead, the intention was to improve existing processes, increase the speed and quality of the financial reporting process, as well as enable the F&A specialists to do more interesting and useful tasks.

The payback time is thus much harder to estimate. Nevertheless, the benefits are obvious – the timeframe for the financial reporting process has been improved, the employees no longer have to work late during peak times, they have more time and are more satisfied with their work. Not a single person has been let off, but the quality of their work has been significantly improved.

This has also proven to be a great case, because it has shown the Client that deploying and maintaining software robots is not expensive and can be done very quickly. The solution is robust, and we are already working on the documentation on more processes, except this time it is not only in the F&A department.