Bots Conquer Mundane Tasks, Saving Precious Hours for Major Retailer

Our Client

A large International Retailer (IR) has been a valued client of Prolifics for over a decade. Renowned globally for its brand names in apparel and accessories, IR has established itself as a leading fashion lifestyle destination for customers.

Challenges

IR dedicated substantial time to mundane, repetitive, and low-value tasks essential for business operations including data entry, analysis of unstructured documents, management of complex Microsoft Excel files, and various other manual processes.

Specifically, IR had a lot of manual processes that revolved around their SAP system, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that helps them optimise their supply chain, manage sales and distribution, handle financial processes, implement merchandise strategies, leverage analytics and reporting insights, and more. The manual execution of queries in SAP system to retrieve the material ledger proved to be a particularly time-intensive endeavour.

Handling a substantial volume of material records, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, posed a considerable challenge in creating corresponding folders for each record. This undertaking was not only labour-intensive but also prone to manual errors.

To overcome these challenges and attain enhanced efficiency and compliance, IR proactively pursued an automation solution.

Action and Results

IR recognised the need for automation to address operational challenges and chose UiPath, a leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform. To fully leverage its capabilities, Prolifics stepped in to support IR in optimising the UiPath platform. IR successfully automated manual and repetitive tasks, freeing up valuable time for business users to focus on more relevant and innovative activities. This transformative shift led to significant improvements in speed, efficiency, and compliance, enabling IR to enhance operational effectiveness.

From a technical standpoint, the use of restricted SAP user accounts was overcome as job completion was efficiently accomplished through a single bot account. This not only resulted in resource savings but also eliminated the need for manual labour and saved considerable time for IR.

• 96% Reduction in Process Time for Material Ledger Reporting: By leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots for material ledger closing tasks, IR achieved an impressive 96% reduction in time, transforming the process from 160 hours to under 6 hours, signifying a remarkable boost in efficiency.
• 99.6% Reduction in Process Time for Sales Order Retrieval: Through automation, the time required for sales order retrieval witnessed a staggering 99.6% decrease, reducing the duration from 70 hours to just 30 minutes. This significant improvement enabled business users to allocate their valuable time to more critical tasks.
• 75% Decrease in Folder Creation Time: Automation encompassed the creation of folders for each material record, adhering to a predefined naming convention. This process, previously demanding 20 hours per week, was streamlined to a mere 5 hours, achieving a noteworthy 75% increase in efficiency while maintaining a flawless error-free performance.

Utilising automation, IR effectively reduced effort and time throughout their processes, resulting in increased order processing, revenue generation, and operational cost reduction. Their collaboration with Prolifics and adoption of UiPath automation brought about transformative changes, yielding substantial time savings, improved efficiency, and heightened employee productivity.

Technology

UiPath is a leading RPA platform that automates repetitive tasks using software robots called bots. It simplifies process automation, freeing up employees’ time for more important work. With a user-friendly interface, UiPath allows businesses to design, deploy, and manage bots efficiently. By automating tasks like data entry and document processing, UiPath enhances productivity, reduces errors, and enables cost savings. Its versatility across applications and industries makes it a valuable tool for organisations seeking digital transformation

About Prolifics Digital Automation & AI

At Prolifics, we specialise in revolutionising business processes by harnessing the potential of automation. By seamlessly distributing work across digital workers (bots) and knowledgeable experts, we unlock remarkable efficiency gains in time, cost, and quality. Our approach enables dynamic scalability, empowering your operations to match demand effortlessly. Moreover, we empower seamless self-service interactions with customers, enhancing satisfaction and driving growth.

About Prolifics

Prolifics is a digital engineering and consulting firm helping clients navigate and accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We deliver relevant outcomes using our systematic approach to rapid, enterprise-grade continuous innovation. We treat our digital deliverables like a customised product – using agile practices to deliver immediate and ongoing increases in value.

We provide consulting, engineering and managed services for all our practice areas – Data & AI, Integration & Applications, Business Automation, DevXOps, Test Automation, and Cybersecurity – at any point our clients need them.

Reach out to our experts today or learn more about our Data & AI solutions.