- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Customer Service
RPA automates entry of promotional activities in SAP
The Sales & Marketing department creates or adjusts approximately 12000 promotion activities in SAP on a yearly basis. This highly repetitive and time-consuming process was the perfect candidate for an RPA solution. This promotional activity entry process is now fully automated, creating the opportunity for employees to focus on value-adding activities instead.
Use case: The process of adding and adjusting promotional activities
Before approaching Ciphix, the Sales & Marketing department of an FMCG company spent a significant amount of time correcting promotional activities throughout the year. This time could have been spent on more value-adding activities. Each year, employees create or adjust approximately 12000 promotional activities in SAP. When creating a new promotional activity, both general customer data and more specific data, such as promotion dates (buy-in, post-dip), condition types (describing the type of promotion), and the volume and trade spendings are added to various fields in SAP. However, these promotional activities are subject to change, which happens frequently and irregularly throughout the year. As a consequence, employees are bound to spend a lot of time correcting these promotional activities in SAP.
This process is highly repetitive and very time-consuming. Employees need to navigate through many pages in SAP Globe to fill out promotion details. Additionally, these details need to be corrected when promotional activities change. The process of filling out details and adjusting them throughout the year is a non-value-adding activity that is prone to human errors. As a result, some of the promotional activities carry mistakes or are not present in the SAP at all.
Our solution: Automate the entry of promotional activities
The company realized that a lot of valuable time was spent on this repetitive task, which could be put to better use. Using UiPath RPA technology, Ciphix created a digital workforce to automate the entry of promotional activities in SAP in order to assist the Marketing & Sales department with this task. Our goal was to fully automate the process and create a standardized and sustainable solution that is less sensitive to human error. Hence, a robot was built to perform the following steps:
- Check which promo forms in Excel should be processed
- Create a new promotion activity in SAP
- Enter data (customer data, promotion dates, etc.) from the Excel form into SAP
- Save the promotion activity in SAP
- Send an email with a status report to Sales & Marketing department
After deployment of the robot, 100% of the process is automated and over 1441 hours are saved on a yearly basis. Due to the standardized way of working of the RPA robot, we achieved a 100% error reduction.
Our RPA robot is effective, efficient, and reliable. Workers can stop wasting time on repetitive entries in SAP and refocus on work that matters. Â
