BFSI, Manufacturing, IT & Software

How a company streamlined purchase order processing using Cognitive Process Automation

AT A GLANCE

Reduced turnaround time from 10 mins to
0

secs.

AT A GLANCE

Elimination of
errors

0 %

AT A GLANCE

Reduction of manual effort

0 %

AT A GLANCE

Annual cost
saving of
approximately

INR 38,25,405/
($50,000)

How a company streamlined purchase order processing using Cognitive Process Automation

Background

Our client was a major company operating across multiple locations in India. They had to manually evaluate a large number of Purchase Orders (PO) for approval each day and this resulted in a time consuming and error-prone process that reduced productivity and was inefficient.

Challenges

The teams received upto 300 invoices daily from multiple sources that needed to be processed by employees in a timely manner. The employees had to manually update data on the ERP Portal, ensure accuracy, approve the PO and send it to the finance team for clearance.
This often resulted in:

Delays in procurement

Poor vendor relationships

Extra costs

Goals & Objectives

1

Reduce manual effort

2

Completely eliminate human errors

3

Establish high productivity while minimising processing time

PO processing was a critical process involving decision-making and financial calculation and as a result, very time-consuming and inefficient when performed manually.

PO processing was a critical process involving decision-making and financial calculation and as a result, very time-consuming and inefficient when performed manually.

Solution

Our team of experts designed an RPA solution with the TO-BE process.
Cognitive Process Automation was used along with RPA for extracting data from the scanned and digital purchase orders.

They recalibrated/trained IQ bots to process unstructured data into the structured form and deployed an unattended BOT to:

Log into the ERP portal and process each PO individually

Train the IQ-Bot for multiple types of PO and produce a structured output for further processing

Extract data from the PO and cross-check it with data available on the ERP Portal

Verify data, approve PO and send it to the assigner for clearance

Reject in case of a mismatch and notify the assigner to manually verify and reuploadv

Our experts designed the system with mathematical calculations as per client standards, trained the bot to handle exceptions and establish fallback workflows. The entire process of PO approval was fully automated and ran independently without human intervention.

Outcome

Our unattended BOT completely automated the PO approval process successfully with a decision making algorithm built into the system. The new hyper-automated process not only saved effort but also completely eliminated errors and delay in the approval cycle which ultimately resulted in much higher productivity.

As a result, the company hit all its goals.

Reduced
turnaround time from 10 mins to

secs.

Elimination of
errors

0 %

Reduction of
manual effort

0 %

Annual cost
saving of
approximately

INR 38,25,405/
($50,000)

Reduced
turnaround time from 10 mins to

secs.

Elimination of
errors

0 %

Reduction of
manual effort

0 %

Annual cost
saving of
approximately

INR 38,25,405/
($50,000)

Tools used