Process Automation
Process automation comes in handy for businesses when things are getting harder. The scope of implementing process automation in a business is beyond limits. It is a modern world solution to minimize manual work, specifically designed to enhance business processes. In a business, anything taking too much time, reducing overall efficiency, or facing difficulties in delivering excellent quality service can be dealt with through process automation. It has become a common thing to integrate into your business.
In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the top companies that effectively implemented process automation into their businesses.
1. Adidas
Without any doubt, Adidas is one of the leading shoe, clothing, and accessories manufacturers in the world. At the growing stage of the company, there was a need to scale up things faster. Adidas started to look for techniques that could help them in achieving improved productivity.
Nowadays, Adidas is just limited to sportswear walk-in stores. It now has a wide range of departments including eCommerce stores, operations, marketing, collaborations, finance, and retail departments. All these departments are interlinked which makes it quite difficult to manage and organize their supply chain. Companies on such a scale usually deal with lengthy and untraceable factory on-off boarding processes, huge collaborative gaps between different departments, or a long list of email chains for resolving support requests. That’s when they thought about using business process automation tools that could possibly help them in making their platform user-friendly and more efficient.
Audi has been using automation software for manufacturing automation and improved supplier onboarding. Using this business process automation solution, Adidas transforms the supply chain across 400 factories to improve operational efficiency by 60%. The initiative went highly successful helping them in reducing the time to market by two-thirds as compared to the traditional in-house development. The implementation of process automation into their business infrastructure helped them with increased productivity across the value chain, decreased operating costs, and generated more revenues. Manufacturing companies need to automate workflows to reduce time to market and ensure quality assurance to stay ahead of the competition.
Adidas Speedfactory is also a great example of how the company included automation in its fundamental business process for quality control. It is also known as the smart factory where automated techniques helped them in testing the shoes for fit and performance. It saved them hundreds of hours by minimizing the setup times and switching costs that are normally associated with producing several types of shoe designs. The process taking up to almost 6 months is now cut to one-third of the typical time while allowing for speed and customization.
2. Audi Japan KK
Core finance processes including Purchase Order (PO) requests or Request for Approvals (RFA) are some suitable areas to implement process automation. Audi Japan KK is a manufacturing and retail company that successfully implemented process automation to reduce processing time by 75% and save 60 hours per week. It’s when they were receiving endless requests for approvals worth millions of dollars on a regular basis. It’s costing them much time and cost to process valuable requests.
The main problem the company was facing is with Request for Approval (RFA) worth millions of dollars affecting performance and efficiency. This is because their current ways were based on manual paperwork which relied on approvals made over the phone or email. The RFAs also get delayed or untraceable when stakeholders are out of reach. It was becoming difficult and time-consuming for the company to deal with complex human procedures, resulting in delays and inefficiencies affecting the overall profits.
Implementing process automation in this area has the potential to automatically process approval requests. The same goes for Audi Japan KK, as it cut the labor hours required to fill out, approve, and send the forms. They also used it to record all the data flowing between all the decision-makers in the process and organize all communication. Audi Japan KK used automation techniques to change their tiresome and time taking process into a streamlined, secure, and paperless process. This enables them to perform tasks more uniformly and efficiently with better resource management.
Audi has implemented an automation process in its production process using Artificial Intelligence techniques. It helped the company in enhancing the quality control of its vehicles and make them fit for the future. The company is also implementing Smart Production to save the resources and time required for the designing and production process of the cars. The method of using Virtual assembly planning also makes innovative, flexible collaboration possible across different locations of the production plants.
3. Swisslog Healthcare
Healthcare is one of the sectors that necessarily need process automation due to repetitive and extensive processes. The same goes for healthcare logistics provider Swisslog Healthcare, a company that reduced lead time for quotations by 50%.
During the growth and development stage of Swisslog Healthcare, the company faced difficulties with fragmented processes and IT systems. The processes are taking much time and effort to manage and track the sales processes. The quotation lead time process was taking up to 42 days which they needed to speed up. Moreover, they also wanted to eliminate human errors from the data entry process.
Like every other flourishing company, Swisslog Healthcare also wanted to improve its products and services for its customers. For that, they need to automate processes through a single platform to achieve full visibility of their sales and increase efficiency. They partnered with Nimble Institute to identify the loopholes in their systems and the areas where they can implement automation to get the desired efficiency.
Using the business process modeling and automation platform, they successfully cut out the time which was spent on non-business value add tasks helping them to focus more on deals and customers. This approach allowed the company to have a more transparent central system. In addition to that, this centralized automation method reduced the data entry time by 30% with more precision. The automation system they are using provides them with a single centralized platform to manage the Inside Sales team. They now centrally manage the sales which results in a quicker quotation lead time and a reduced risk of errors in quotations.
Kitameraki has expertise in optimizing business processes, which can help you increase your productivity and efficiency. Feel free to contact us.