- Construction
- Finance department
How UiPath RPA saved over 1440 hours of repetitive work for employees
Employees working at an industrial service provider suffered from a lengthy invoicing process, which took up about 20 minutes and over 100 clicks to submit one single invoice. We offer an UiPath RPA-based solution that automates this invoicing process. As a result, workers now have more time to focus on value-adding activities instead.
Use case: The lengthy process of invoicing clients
At an industrial service company, invoicing clients in the scaffolding industry takes up a significant amount of time for the workers. In order to submit a single invoice, workers have to provide (mostly the same) invoice details in three different applications: an internal application, an external web application of the client, and SAP Ariba. Workers spend about 20 minutes and over 100 clicks to execute this process from start to finish, just for one single invoice.
Workers start this process by extracting a provisional invoice and associated files from the internal application. Once extracted, employees need to fill out these invoice details in a calculation tool in the external web application of their client to calculate the order and download a detailed estimate report. The same information is then entered into SAP Ariba, which submits the invoice. Lastly, the status of the invoice is updated in the companies’ internal application.
Imaginably, this process is extremely time-consuming and highly repetitive. The same information has to be typed into applications over and over again. Due to a large number of rules and exceptions to these rules, human errors are easily made. This, however, makes the process an ideal candidate for RPA.
Our solution: Automating the invoicing process
In order to automate this invoicing process, we used UiPath RPA technology to create a digital workforce. Our goal was to reduce repetitive and time-consuming, administrative tasks. The attended robot is triggered by the worker and designed to perform the following tasks:
- Read input data and perform below mentioned tasks for each item
- Extract provisional invoice (Excel) and associated files (PDFs) from internal application
- Fill in invoice details into external web application of client
- Calculate order and download detailed estimate report
- Submit provisional invoice in SAP Ariba with correct price and attachments
- Update invoice status in internal application
Not only is our robot able to fully automate this process, it also saves over 1440 hours on a yearly basis by doing so. The robot also makes the invoicing process less prone to human error, as it memorizes every business rule and process exception. By automating the invoicing process, employees have more time to focus on other tasks instead.
Our solution is effective, efficient and reliable. Workers can stop wasting time on manually invoicing hundreds of invoices and shift their focus on work that matters.