RPA helps stock planners at a FMCG company meet their SLA

Stock planners at a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company have to provide a delivery update to their merchants every day between 10:00-12:00 AM. This is time-consuming and limits the freedom of the workers. We offer an intelligent solution that combines RPA and AI to automate this process. We reduced the workload and increased the performance of stock-planners.

1 month delivery time

Use case: Manually checking sales orders every day

At one of the largest FMCG companies in the world, 25 stock planners have to provide a delivery update to their merchants every day between 10:00-12:00 AM. In order to adhere to this service-level agreement (SLA), the planners check which items in the sales orders are out-of-stock. The planners extract the sales orders from SAP into an Excel format. They manually go through each sales order, one-by-one. For each out-of-stock item, an email is sent to the merchants with information regarding this item.

Not only is this process very time-consuming, it also limits the freedom of the planners each day. Employees check each item manually, making the process sensitive to human error. These problems serve as an ideal case for a solution combining RPA and AI.

APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES

Month to ROI

3840

Saved hours annually

30%

Error reduction

100%

Of effort automated

100%

Service level

Our solution: RPA and AI combined to bring full automation

To automate the process of checking out-of-stock items, a digital workforce has been created using RPA and AI technologies. Our goal was to fully automate the process and reduce the workload of the planners. Our robot is triggered every five minutes to export stock allocation data from SAP and prepare this data for processing. After this, our robot is built to perform the following tasks:

Start at 10:00 AM on a daily basis
Receive Excel batch containing all necessary order data
Check which items can be tuned to out-of-stock
Update out-of-stock items
Send email to merchant with a process report Excel file

Our robot is able to fully automate (100%) the process and save over 3840 hours on a yearly basis. The merchants are now always informed on time about out-of-stock items, while the planners have more time for their main responsibilities.

Our robot offers a solution that is effective, efficient and reliable. Workers can stop wasting time on manually checking out-of-stock items and refocus on work that matters.