CPFL Energia automates IT, supply chain, HR and financial processes so that these teams have more time to dedicate to analytical and strategy activities

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.