DCH to Save 10,000 Hours Annually with RPA

THE WHOLE STORY

The first bot was implemented for SIMS, the Hong Kong Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) business unit. Prior to automation, employees received customer e-mail orders and had to log into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manually input each one. Because of this, staff were sometimes required to come back into work on weekends to handle urgent orders. RPA changed that by automating the necessary tasks, resulting in an improved work-life balance for employees while also providing a better customer experience. This motivated employees to think about other areas of their work where automation could be used.

RPA was also used for the cash application process in the Finance department. Before automation, employees had to collect customer payment information from various sources such as PDFs and e-mails then manually extract the data into another document. Information from customer statements also had to be collected from an ERP system and then manually input into a spreadsheet. Trying to match invoices line by line of up to 8,000 records per day was a very tedious process. After that was completed, the customer receipt information still had to be input back into Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle Financials. With RPA, four of the previously manual processes could now be handled by a bot.

DCH also used IQ Bot, which has optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning (ML) features to digitally recognize the content from documents. With ML and sufficient training, new document formats can now be recognized. IQ Bot was implemented as a solution for the Electrical Appliance Department (EAD) to automate customer order delivery.

The benefits of RPA were especially noticed when the COVID-19 pandemic required minimized social contact and most staff to work from home. With repetitive, tedious, and manual processes automated, employees did not need to be at the office and business was able to operate as usual with no interruptions.

The company expects to save more than 10,000 hours annually with automation. To date, 14 Bot Runners, 10 unattended and 4 attended, and 8 Bot Creators are in production, with 15 automated processes in production.