Client background & business context
- Client profile: international logistics company present in more than 100 countries worldwide.
- Project: RPA-powered solution meant to both digitize and automate the time-consuming, error-prone, manual cash allocation process within the client's shared services centre.
Our aim: simplify, streamline, and speed up the given process, enabling employees to accomplish their tasks in a timely manner, to successfully meet deadlines, while effectively contributing to fulfilling business needs.
Challenges
Due to a constant addition of new business, as well as our client’s worldwide distribution, the company recognized the need for their cash allocation process to get a digital makeover.
- The process relied on ever increasing manual work and amounts of paper, as well as a constant switch between physical and digital systems, and stakeholders involved.
- The process included both weekly and monthly peak periods, during which employees dealt with two times, respectively three times the normal workload. Though the company tried to solve this issue by reinforcing the workforce allocated, delays and errors were still registered for the cash allocation flow.
- No SOP (standard operating procedure) was put in place for the cash allocation process, again leaving room for errors within the flow.
Our approach
Given these insights, we kicked the project off with a thorough analysis and documentation of several of the client’s cash allocation procedures, in order to identify the contained differences and define the SOP (standard operating procedure) that would help streamline the given flow.
We decided on a UiPath-based robotic process automation (RPA) of the cash allocation process as the best course of action. To empower this solution to reach its full potential, we designed and built a suite of robots to work in parallel and paired them with ABBYY – an OCR tool. These robots would digitise a substantial part of the until then physical work the cash allocation process entailed.
Due to the client’s worldwide distribution and the differences registered within the process from one business unit to another, we opted for the waterfall methodology for the planning and process documentation stages of the project. Within the implementation stage, we worked based on the agile methodology with a milestone-based delivery. This hybrid approach supported the priorities set by the client and enabled us to deliver according to plan.
Technologies
- UiPath
- ABBYY
Results
- Process standardization: during the process modelling phase, our consultants challenged the status quo and helped simplify and streamline the cash allocation process by putting a standard operating procedure in place.
- Process optimisation: the result of applying robotic process automation to the cash allocation process is a 50% boost in productivity.
- Increased efficiency: since employing the high-performing suite of robots designed and developed by Accesa, deadlines are met during peak periods as well, regardless of workload volume, with 100% accuracy.
- Boosted employee satisfaction: employees were relieved of the manual, error-prone steps of the process and could now focus on more value-adding tasks.
- Automated reporting: the robots generate detailed reports of their work, replacing the considerable amounts of manual reporting necessary up to that point. In addition, the solution provides an electronic history of every action the robots have taken, granting everyone involved a clear overview.
- Scalability & flexibility: additional robots could be employed during peak periods to ensure the entire workload is managed without additional user intervention.
Besides the actual robotic process automation applied to the cash allocation process, this project also consisted in a company-wide analysis of the given process, shedding light on various opportunities to make it easier to work with, as well as more effective and efficient in contributing to overall business growth.
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E-mail: hello (at) accesa.eu
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