Holcim uses Automation 360 Cloud to optimize global shared processes, boosting efficiency by 40%.

ORGANIZATION PROFILE

A world leader in building materials, Holcim employs 63,000 people in 61 countries. Holcim contributes to the construction of cities around the world with its cement, aggregates, and concrete businesses.

THE CHALLENGE

Holcim has three shared service centers in America, Europe, and India. However, due to recent mergers, the company faced the challenge of onboarding many other geographies, such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and France, all of which had multiple shared services and processes. After a successful RPA implementation in India, they chose to continue their global RPA journey with Automation 360™.

100%

Accuracy

92%

Faster credit approval process

40%

Increase in overall efficiency

“In both processes, we saw a 40% increase in efficiency, which translates to about seven FTEs .”

—Yashpal Wala , AVP, RPA and Automation , Holcim.

THE SOLUTION

In India, Holcim has two operating companies, ACC and Ambuja Cement, which operate in their own respective way. Using Automation 360 Cloud, Holcim standardized the process of sharing details between the two companies, which included nearly 80 fields of information, such as addresses, postal codes, and security deposits. In a separate project, Holcim used bots to share customer information between companies in order to assign credit limits to new customers.

Processes Automated

Creating new customers

Searching for duplicate entries of customers

Assigning credit limits

THE WHOLE STORY

Before Holcim embarked on its RPA journey, assigning a credit limit to a customer was a two- to three-day process. In the case of temporary credit limits, employees were required to disrupt their sleep to check which client's limit was expiring each night at midnight and work for an additional hour updating the data. With ten bots in production, the entire credit assignment process is automated, and what took several days now takes just a few hours.

Prior to automation, the process of creating new customers took 48 hours per customer to complete. About 80 fields of data required input to set up each new account. Using a human-to-bot approach resulted in a standardization of the process, improving turnaround time to just four hours. As a bonus, automating these processes also identified areas for optimization, flagged two types of clients, "sold-to" and "ship-to," and revealed duplicate accounts.

The automation illustrated how two bots could work in tandem, one creating a customer in the system and informing another bot who then assigns credit limits. All of this happens near real-time, instead of the former two business days for the manual process. With the successes of these use cases in India, Holcim moved on to automate and standardize similar processes in Europe and throughout the Americas.

THE FUTURE

Holcim continues to standardize its nearly 100 shared processes throughout each global region via Automation 360 Cloud deployed on AWS. The company also plans to automate the almost 5,000 daily invoices received in India and Europe using optical character recognition (OCR) with Automation 360.

As a global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions, Holcim is enabling greener cities and smarter infrastructure while improving living standards around the world. Their partnership with Automation Anywhere and AWS will help in finding ways to improve emissions savings for future projects completed together.