RPA in Manufacturing
Automating processes in manufacturing boosts efficiency and increases accuracy and timeliness
RPA solutions increased our clients' sourcing efficiency and improved their data quality in supply chain management
Although often overlooked, back office and operational processes in manufacturing have very high automation potential. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) significantly increases efficiency, enhances accuracy, improves customer experience and creates cost-savings in those processes.
Benefits of RPA in Manufacturing companies' processes
Improved data quality
Quality and accuracy are improved when data is updated faster and error-free.
Increased speed and productivity
RPA speeds up processes and increases efficiency by removing manual work.
Enhanced customer experience
Robots permit quicker response to customer requests and better management of customer data.
Higher cost savings
RPA creates immediate direct cost savings and RPA investment's payback time is usually a few months.
RPA use case examples in Manufacturing
SOURCING & PROCUREMENT
- Operational purchasing
- Sourcing support
- Procurement admin
- Demand planning
- Account payables & others
LOGISTICS & SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
- Supplier management
- Delivery management & tracking (e.g. updating arrival dates in SAP)
- Contract management
- Supplier details collection from supplier databases
- Offer screening
PRODUCTION PLANNING
- Material availability check
- Daily fill rate reports
- Printing BOMs
- Closing orders
CUSTOMER SERVICE
- Processing returns and handling orders
- Updating order status
- Processing customer feedback
- Handling customer requests
CASE: AUTOMATION IN SUPPLY CHAIN & LOGISTICS IN A MULTINATIONAL MANUFACTURING COMPANY
A multinational manufacturing company with a global supply chain.
The company’s global supply chain has multiple containers arriving daily by ship to their finnish hub. Arrival times of these containers are tracked in SAP, but delays or changes to the exact dates occur regularly. Keeping track of these changes is time consuming.
Robot was implemented by Sisua to daily update changing arrival dates to SAP. Process was straightforward to automate with modularity to expand automation scope into similar tasks in SCM. Regular and automated information improved the data quality in SAP as the supply planners could trust the accuracy of the arrival dates.
Shortening the goods-in-transit time and providing up-to-date stock availability for delivery centers and onward to retail / shops was an important outcome of the automation.
Automating the process also created FTE savings, but achieving qualitative improvements was more significant in this case.
“New model is vastly superior and nobody wants to go back to the old ways of working”
– Supply planner
CASE: AUTOMATION IN SOURCING IN A MULTINATIONAL MANUFACTURING COMPANY
A multinational manufacturing company with a strong focus in Continental Europe.
RPA was seen as the right tool for driving efficiency, quality and execution speed in the company’s core business and support functions. The company chose Sisua to help understand RPA’s potential in its functions, build RPA operating model and provide process automation as a service to scale RPA across the company.
First automations are in production including “Stock shortage check for items”. Main focus is in sourcing function, but will expand to other functions, such as Production planning and F&A. In the long term the company is interested in training its own business users to develop personal assistant –type task automations.
Automation of stock shortage items check decreases the number of items that are in danger of shortage and ensures better component availability, which reduces bottlenecks in production. 0,8 FTE will be released to more valuable tasks due to automation.
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