We have talked a lot about automation, but in this blog, I thought we would talk about automation in the real world. And, by that, I mean a real-life example that we are currently working on that can help to improve on accuracy, speed and will definitely save money.

So how does it work?

We are currently in talks with a manufacturing company about automating the order process. Currently, they have 2 members of staff working on this process but because of the number of orders, they are inundated and orders are starting to slip and take longer to process. As we all know, when you order a product, you want it asap and if your standard order processing says you will despatch within 5 days, and you don’t, you upset your customer and they go elsewhere. So order processing is crucial to your business.

How does it work at present?

Each customer will submit an order by email on a .pdf document. This will then get picked up by the order processing team in the order it is received. They will then print the copy, then it is manually checked to ensure there are no errors and finally, the operator will then manually input this order into the manufacturing software, in this case, SAP.

So as you can imagine, if you are doing lots of these orders, it becomes quite a time consuming and laborious process.

How can automation help?

With automation, Unleashed can help to streamline the time-consuming aspects of this process and increase the accuracy of data entry.

In simple terms:

  1. Order will still come in by email as a .pdf
  2. Automation will extract the relevant order information from the .pdf and send it straight into SAP. This removes the time-consuming element and ensures all information is correct.
  3. Order will then be checked in SAP before finally being approved and sent for manufacturing.

What are the benefits to the business of this form of automation?

  1. Speed of processing, we estimate a 50% improvement in time to process
  2. Accuracy, as we have already mentioned, if you remove manual input you improve accuracy
  3. For the end-user, we have taken away the tedious part of the process
  4. In this case, we have saved the customer having to take on another member of staff, therefore saving on salary etc.

What else can we automate?

In simple terms, if you have a manual process that involves data entry, then it can be possibly be automated. However, every business has different ways of working, and the only way you will know if your process can be automated in a cost-effective way is to speak to us and we can advise you.

, this means we will look for the best and most cost-effective product to suit your way of working. So, why not and let’s talk about the best way forward.