Automotive leader implements RPA solution to de-risk its inventory management and reduce stockouts

Highlights
  • Customer

    Fortune 500 firm

  • Industry

    Automotive

Benefits
  • 100% elimination of manual efforts for safety stock updation
  • Saving of 40-person hours per week (i.e., 1 FTE per month)
  • Error-free safety stock updation
  • Improvement in sales turnover due to timely demand fulfillment
Business Situation

The client depended on demand planners to manually update the safety stock levels for various products in the ERP system. While there was a standard operating procedure (SOP) defined for this process, this was a non-value adding activity for the demand planners. Further, the frequent deviations from the SOP led to errors that significantly impacted the fulfillment of the market demand. The client needed an automation solution that could automate their safety stock updation in the system and improve the fulfillment of the market demand.

Business Challenges

Our client had two significant business challenges that prompted the need for a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution:

  • Safety stock updation by demand planners was a repetitive, manual, and non-value adding activity.
  • This manual process was prone to errors, which resulted in stockouts and loss of sales.
Birlasoft Solution

Birlasoft's team of supply chain management experts and automation/RPA SMEs developed automation bots to solve for the above-listed challenges. The critical facets of this solution are listed below:

  • The RPA bot would run once a week, which triggered a series of steps listed below.
  • The bot would read the emails and notifications received from the demand planners.
  • It would mine for specific information, data points, and filters in the email and update the safety stock details in the ERP without any need for manual guidance or intervention.
  • As a final step, the bot notifies all users, including demand planners, of the status of the exercise.