Robotic Process Automation can be applied on processes which are repetitive in nature day in and day out. Let’s take a use case of a business function along with activities carried out by a department. Use-Case for RPA Procurement Department deals in procuring various kind of material into the premises of the organization like
Inventory items
Non- Inventory items
Assets
Every organization has its own way of generating purchase orders for inventoried items.
Enterprise Planning Engine (EP) generates Purchase orders.
Purchase requisitions get converted to Purchase orders.
Project requirement planning generates purchase orders.
Manual Purchase order creation
For procurement of non-inventory items’, the general practice used across industries are
Raising of purchase requisition and converting them into purchase orders
Paper based approval mechanism for procuring non-inventory items
Directly creating purchase order in ERPLN procurement model.
All these scenarios require sizeable manpower to execute the process like -Procurement department requires manpower for following activities
Creation of purchase orders for domestic materials
Creation of purchase orders for importing materials
Purchase manager for reviewing the purchase orders generated by team and following up with suppliers and freight forwarders on goods delivery etc.
Negotiating with suppliers on payment delays etc.
Generating vendor rating and distributing and many more
Maintaining supplier relationship
(Minimum of 3 to 4 people would carry out these activities and 1 Manager and 1 Signing authority.)
General Challenges prevailing across organizations within the department to mention few
Internal order lead-time from creating a purchase order to getting it approved takes around minimum 2 days to maximum 5 days.
Data accuracy with which the orders get created. It varies from organization to organization; however, it could be around 80% on an average.
Volume of orders to be created/generated could be extremely as high as 500 to 1000 purchase orders in a day or more depending on the industry vertical.
Maintaining stronger supplier relationship and helping suppliers increase their product quality by giving inputs to suppliers.
We always get to hear, garbage in is garbage out during any ERP implementations. So, a lot depends on the quality of data fed into the system by human beings on daily basis.
Now that, we have fair idea on functions and challenges of procurement department, we will progress onto how these can be addressed at broad level.
How RPA is going to help in overcoming the challenges around the procurement department?
With RPA, we can automate creation of purchase orders in ERPLN, without human intervention thereby overcoming all the above-mentioned challenges
There are many ways in which we can trigger the automated solution to create purchase orders in ERPLN. Few ways are listed below a. We can use PDF attachments in email to read and create purchase order b. We can use file-based mechanism to read and create purchase orders
RPA solution can bring down internal order creation lead time by 60% and move it to next process.
With RPA solution, data entry accuracy at order level can be increased to 100%
With RPA solutions we can create as many as 100 purchase orders accurately in a span of 60 minutes.
Procurement managers and representative can spend more qualitative time with their suppliers and build strong relationship with them. Be productive in-terms of nurturing small suppliers to balance product cost and product quality effectively.
Technologies used for building RPA solutions:
There are many technologies available today to build RPA solutions; to name a few
UIpath
Automation Anywhere etc.
Other patented solution
Reach out to us on info@nicheBees.com for knowing further about our ongoing project references, costing and engagement models of using RPA on ERPLN