Customer Background
Our client, a global leader in manufacturing, manages highly complex financial systems, with thousands of customers spread across various regions. The company relies heavily on SAP for financial processes including invoicing, payments and tracking pending invoices to ensure timely payments. The credit control team, consisting of over 10 professionals, was responsible for manually logging into the SAP system, retrieving aging reports, identifying overdue invoices, cross reference with received payments, and sending reminder emails to thousands of customers. This task consumed 2-3 full working days per cycle, significantly impacting productivity. With thousands of unique customer interactions each month, it was clear that this process was not sustainable.
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Industry
Manufacturing
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Technologies / Platforms / Frameworks
Power Automate Desktop, SAP, AWS
Challenges
The client was having majorly manual credit control system operations, relying on a team of a few people to extract data from SAP, validate it, and send reminders. This manual approach resulted in inefficiencies, increased workload, and frequent errors, causing delays in collections and negatively impacting cash flow. Handling the complexity and scale of thousands of invoices per cycle further complicated the process. Several critical challenges needed to be addressed to optimize operations and reduce manual effort, such as:
Reduced Process Time
The credit control team spent 2-3 days manually logging into SAP, generating reports, and cross-referencing invoice data with payments for a single day, slowing down the entire workflow.
Improve processing speed & accuracy
Manual data validation and invoice tracking across thousands of customers increased the possibilities of human errors, resulting in discrepancies and delay in notifying customers.
Email Personalization & Sending
Sending personalized email reminders to each customer with their overdue invoices required significant manual effort from writing email to attaching the right invoice. This led to inconsistent follow-ups and occasional communication mistakes.
Issues with Operation Scaling
As they’ve gained more customers and invoices, the process has become more and more unsustainable. The team was then unable to keep up with the growing workload efficiently.
Solutions
To address these challenges, we proposed a comprehensive RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solution implementation using Microsoft Power Automate Desktop. The goal is to have automated end-to-end processes, from logging into SAP to sending personalized reminder emails, significantly reducing manual intervention and improving overall accuracy and efficiency. Below are the key elements of the solution:
Automated SAP login and data retrieval
Power Automate Desktop was configured with credentials and authentication processes to log into the SAP system automatically, navigate to the required modules, and export critical reports such as the aging and pending invoice reports, reducing manual effort and executing error free.
Data Processing and validation checks
The power automate bot processed the exported reports using predefined logic, identifying overdue invoices quickly. This ensured consistent and error-free data validation by cross-referencing pending amounts with received payments.
Automated email preparation and delivery
Personalized email details with overdue invoice were generated for each customer. The RPA bot sent customized reminder emails, including invoice specifics, to thousands of customers in a fraction of the time previously required.
Scheduled and repeating automation
We scheduled the entire process to run at regular intervals, ensuring timely email delivery with precise details, all without any manual intervention. This cleared up the much-needed time of the credit control team to focus on other more important financial activities
Benefits
- Reduction in Manual Effort: Automation reduced the time spent on generating reports and sending emails from 2-3 days to just a few hours, freeing up valuable resources for other tasks.
- Improved Cash Flow Management: Timely reminders led to faster customer payments, contributing to better cash flow and reducing outstanding balances by 15% within the first quarter.
- Increased Accuracy: Automation eliminated human errors in processing large datasets, improving the reliability of financial data.
- Scalability: The RPA solution is scalable, handling growing transaction volumes without additional headcount or costs.
- Employee Satisfaction: The team experienced increased satisfaction as mundane tasks were automated, allowing them to focus on strategic financial analysis.
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