Fashion designer

The challenge

A successful fashion designer discovered that a number of tedious, manual processes were driving down efficiencies and contributing to employee frustration in its retail and e-commerce business. Every day, employees had to retrieve and enter exchange rates, pay bills, aggregate and interpret data and create reports manually. Furthermore, these monotonous, low-value administrative tasks tied up needed work resources.

Further analysis revealed that manual processes dotted the company, from administration to accounting, risk management, financial planning and reporting. To help alleviate the problem, the company turned to Hyland for help.

The solution

The Hyland RPA solution provided the company with robotic process automation (RPA) software tools that fit seamlessly into the organization’s IT landscape. RPA is an ideal solution for business processes that require human intervention because it replicates many of the activities done by human workers.

For example, data entry, data validation and ticket routing can all be completed by software robots. When RPA is combined with a product that intelligently captures paper-based data and converts it to structured data, the entire data intake process can be automated.

Fortunately, the company did not have to adjust any of its internal processes to implement RPA, since Hyland built the technology to both learn from and imitate human action.

The company automated the following processes:

Store operation

Daily sales and cash receipt checks, cash reconciliation, checking of store prices and inventory as well as e-commerce sales analysis.

Administration

Entry of current exchange rates, commissioning, wholesale invoicing, draft financial statement preparation, monthly and weekly calculation of profits and losses as well as processing of custom documents.

Accounts payable

Order entry, order approval, invoice registration and payment.

Treasury

Bank account registration, bank reconciliation, financial expenses and treasury planning as well as temporary accounts reconciliation.

Planning and control

Group reporting package creation, daily sales reports, weekly DOS reports, forecasting and benchmarking with competitors.

Automating each business process took anywhere from three to fifteen days, depending on its complexity. Now, many of them (such as querying exchange rates and invoice registration) begin automatically at fixed times. Employees trigger others by directing an email to the Hyland RPA solution. Each step in the process is logged and stored, allowing the company to identify and correct any problems, such as missing or incomplete data. A documentation tool allows employees to document all process runs.

Benefits

Since the start of its automation journey with Hyland RPA, the company has:

• Saved more than 8 hours per day in manual labor
• Automated 1.5 FTEs
• More than 80% of the bots deployed work autonomously, without human intervention
• Increased accuracy in calculations, statements, reports, forecasts and order processing

The company plans to continue its automation journey by identifying additional processes across functional areas that would benefit from the help of robotic assistants. With a flexible and easily scalable solution, Hyland RPA stands ready to extend its current implementation to deliver even greater ROI over time.