RPA Nurtures Productivity in the
Consumer Packaged Goods & Retail Sectors

Even the largest companies constantly seek to improve their operations. In this case, our customer is a world-leading retail and wholesale business, with a presence in over 25 countries and more than 2 million employees globally.

Confronted with a constant increase of processes and not enough employees to handle them manually, the retailer had to rethink how its entire business functioned, down to the nitty-gritty. RPA became the logical step forward and UiPath was chosen for its power to automate a wide variety of processes across any environment rapidly and with ease.

Working with UiPath was “agile, easy as it comes, and responsive”.World-leading retailer, present in over 25 countries, over 2 million employees

The Challenge

Tax, Audit, HR or Citrix-driven operations are just some of the few areas where the retailer identified the best-suited processes for automation. One of these concerned the “Back office retail file report” in its Brazilian stores. All the reports from hundreds of stores closing on the day before were used so that store managers could validate the closing information for each cash register. A different type of process was related to “Tax Invoices” and involved the retailer quarterly crawling through each vendor’s website to get invoices. Time-consuming and error-prone, these activities prevented employees to be fully productive and make an impact in more customer-centric activities.

The Solution

For the “Back office retail file report”, the report for each store is now stored in its dedicated individual FTP server. From there, a UiPath Robot reads the input from the terminal and gathers all the information. It then accesses each FTP server and downloads the file and finally aggregate all the reports and dumps them into a shared drive.

In the “Tax invoice” case, the process was reorganized by employing RPA Robots to automatically log into a vendor’s website. Once logged in, the Robot reads the configurable search filters, interprets the content of documents in local drives and merges documents according to their specifications.

Powerful Outcomes

Implementing RPA has already brought immediate results. The 400 robots implemented delivered 100% process accuracy.For the retailer, RPA will continue to drive efficiency improvements and free up employees for mission-critical tasks. Working with UiPath was “agile, easy as it comes, and responsive”, allowing them to reach the best automation solutions for each selected process. The responsiveness and support of the UiPath team were a key differentiator.

The Challenge

The customer has a large global presence and sought to automate repetitive and laborious tasks to drive efficiency, productivity and accuracy across various service lines: Procure to Pay (P2P), Order to Cash (O2C), Record to Analyze (R2A), Supply Chain Management (SCM)/ MDM & Tax. All these while keeping the same systems and applications in order without altering the business process flow and steps.

The Solution

Together with implementation partner Capgemini, a robotics Center of Excellence (CoE) was established. After a Proof of Concept (POC) was successfully implemented, the project was taken into full scale using a complete UiPath Attended & Unattended automation strategy for agent-assisted work as well as back-office intensive activities, where Citrix-based processing represented a main component.

Powerful Outcomes

By the end of 2017, UiPath had delivered productivity gains the equivalent of 85 FTEs through the automation of 62 process activities. The normal cycle time was reduced by 60% and the UiPath Robots now complete tasks 3 times faster than advisors. What’s more, the solution provided an ease of scalability to extend the virtual team of co-workers.