Overview
The International Fashion Company conducts two annual fashion shows, allowing its employees to purchase showcased merchandise. However, this process involves handoffs between six groups, creating limited transparency and potential order errors. Accelirate overcame this challenge and streamlined this complex procedure, ensuring the fulfillment of all employee orders.
Challenges
Several challenges plagued the company’s order fulfillment process before implementing an Industrial strategy automation-based solution.
- Lack of Transparency: The process involved multiple handoffs between different departments, making tracking orders difficult.
- Potential Errors: With numerous manual steps involved, the process was susceptible to errors in order selection, quantity, and size, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
- Complex Logistics: Coordinating international shipping and warehouse operations posed logistical challenges, with a lengthy wait time for merchandise to arrive.
- Payment Delinquency: Managing payments from employees within specified time frames was a recurring issue, requiring consistent follow-up and potential escalations.
Solutions
Accelirate overcame this through a series of automated steps after RPA implementation based on RPA as a service model.
- Automated Sales preparation: RPA implementation leads to the bot automatically downloading the catalog, excluding ineligible items and uploading sales data for employee orders.
- Order management automation: After downloading and reviewing every employee order, the bot consolidates the order data into a spreadsheet and finalizes orders according to the fashion system.
- Automated order tracking: The bot fetches information regarding shipment in advance, streamlining the international shipping process as a result.
- Bot-handled invoice and payment management: After initiating payment requests, the bot verifies the payment and generates invoices, automating the final aspect of the process effectively overcoming the RPA challenge. The bot also manages cash transactions, generates comprehensive reports with order specifics and saves them for recordkeeping.
Results
RPA implementation has led to significant improvements and results:
- Enhanced Order Tracking: The RPA solution ensured orders were tracked accurately at every stage, minimizing the risk of loss or cancellations without records.
- Reduced Errors: Automation simplified inventory verification, purchase order management, and payment verification, reducing the likelihood of errors and enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Time Savings: The Finance Department, Fashion Account Services, and Warehouse Team benefited from substantial time savings due to the automated processes.
- Efficient Payment Management: Payment processing became more efficient, with automated follow-ups for delinquent payments and escalations when necessary.