Automation of PR & PO process for Reimbursement Transaction

The Challenge

In this automobile manufacturing plant, the Parts, Logistics and General Administration functions were burdened with the creation of purchase requisitions & purchase order for the reimbursement invoices raised by its vendors. Here the user receives the invoices through email and as a hard copy. The user in the Parts & Logistics division manually creates an excel sheet and emails it for PR creation. A data operator verifies the request from the email and the invoice and raises the PR in SAP. The PR then gets printed and manually signed off by the relevant authority and released. The General admin personnel then creates the PO in SAP, which goes for approval before the invoice could be put into process for payment. This manual task was highly time-consuming and often caused delays in TAT.

The key challenge in this manual process

The functions need to handle around 1200 invoices resulting in 200+ POs every month
The average time to verify and raise as PR was 29 minutes and for a PO was 15 minutes
The manual approval for every individual PR & PO by relevant authorities led to inordinate delays, apart from consuming senior Managers’ time. The cycle time for a single PR-PO process was estimated to be between 5-7 days.

Solution

KGISL introduced UiPath Bots to automate this process with minimal human interventions, resulting in signification saving in cost and time.

Stage 1 – Purchase requisition automation

Bot reads the inbox, extracts relevant data sent by the user
The Bot uses the scanned invoice copies for comparison and validates the data for PR creation
Bot then creates the purchase request in SAP application
Bot send a consolidated PR list for approval to the relevant authority
Upon email approval, the bot releases the PR in the SAP system for further processing

Stage 2 – Purchase order automation

Upon PR release, the bot creates Purchase Order automatically and uploads PO details to the web application and a report is shared with all designated authority.

The complete task is handled by the bot. Also with the introduction on consolidated PR approval by email, senior leadership time on approval is reduced.