
CPFL Energia automates IT, supply chain, HR and financial processes so that these teams have more time to dedicate to analytical and strategy activities
ABOUT
CPFL Energia ( CPFL) of Campinas, São Paulo is the third largest Brazilian electric utility company with 13,500 employees and annual revenues of US$8B. The 106-year-old company operates biomass power plants, hydropower plants and wind farms. They provide sustainable energy solutions and a wide range of services including public lighting repair, energy theft protection, new connections and scheduled shutdowns. Their efforts positively impact over 200 million people living in Brazil.
50
hours saved daily
45
processes automated in one year
155K
automated transactions/year

“Automating processes with the Automation Anywhere Enterprise RPA platform has helped us increase employee productivity, mitigate operational risks, and increase customer satisfaction. Now, we can deploy the digital transformation to all CPFL’s groups.”
— Aloisio Kukolj, RPA Program Manager
THE SOLUTION
CPFL implemented RPA to automate time-consuming processes and eliminate errors, so that their teams could focus on strategic and analytical activities. Bots were deployed to manage processes companywide in many functional areas in their Shared Services Center, including HR,Finance, Supply Chain and IT. By introducing RPA, CPFL has created multiple new positions in its RPA Center of Excellence (CoE). This center is a partnership between IT and its BPM department. It ensures that bot operations move smoothly and efficiently and are consistent across the enterprise. As a result of automation, CPFL has more resources available to focus on customer support and internal strategy, while reducing errors and saving money.
Processes Automated

Procure to pay

Employee scheduling

Report generation

Customer updates

Sales order generation

Password resets
THE WHOLE STORY
CPFL began its journey with RPA to do more with less, accelerating processes and eliminating errors. After considering several RPA software solutions, CPFL chose Automation Anywhere because of the standard of RPA functionality and support structure that is provided.
CPFL's RPA proof of concept used one single bot. This produced impressive results and encouraged the leadership team to immediately began implementing solutions for six additional processes. They also realized the need for a Center of Excellence on RPA to work with developers, business partners and CPFL's corporate BPM department. Their role was to represent the customer, analyzing all requests for RPA and identifying their suitability for automation.
The focus for the first year of automation was the Shared Services Center in the IT, Supply Chain, Finance and HR departments.
In the Supply Chain department, automation was used for the creation of contractual documents and the registration of scrap and retired operational equipment.
To support the HR department, bots were used to schedule employee holiday requests, as well as calculating payroll for employees on vacation. They were used to automate the consolidation of taxes paid to the employees of service companies, thus avoiding labor lawsuits. They also enabled reporting on a number of matrices about these service companies to senior management.
In the Finance department, bots create, file, approve, and send purchase orders to suppliers. They check the status of the order and pass the information back to the appropriate human if necessary. In addition, bots create and send invoices to customers, record payments, download proof of payment and send receipts to all interested parties. CPFL's new customer register communicates with bots to make requests and receive automated responses with information about their transactions. After clients register, a bot adds them to the client's records list.
In 2018, CPFL analyzed 124 business process. 45 were developed and deployed. These automated processes returned approximately 50 hours each day to the business and have executed more than 156,000 automated transactions.
The introduction of the RPA allowed CPFL to focus on strategy while maintaining consistency and efficiency throughout the organization. Today the Shared Services team is leveraging RPA in even more reporting functions across the enterprise.
THE FUTURE
CPFL plans to automate more business processes in the Shared Services department and expanding its application into critical power operations and business processes using RPA and IA technologies. The company is considering cognitive automation with the Automation Anywhere IQ Bot to support invoicing, billing, and compliance processes that handle substantial amounts of unstructured data.
“With Automation Anywhere Enterprise we are able to automate processes in just 2 to 4 weeks. The platform allows us to monitor all bots that are in operation, which lets us see productivity in real-time.”
— Tiago Machado, CoE RPA Leader
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