What are the challenges?
In any company, there are many challenges that take creative solutions to streamline multiple moving parts and create continuity and integrity of data. Without having multiple people manipulating data and focusing on keeping errors within files low, productivity and the ability to advance corporate goals becomes difficult.
The first problem that Lanshore identified and tackled with our client was the lack of an automated feed to upload territories through an ODI(Oracle Data Integrator used as an etl program which effectively means movement of data sets) process to maintain a strawman to track the territory definitions.
The tedious process in place to update around 300 territories individually took around seven to fifteen minutes per territory. These territories changed daily over a tracked period of five months.
How did Lanshore deliver RPA for streamlining this complicated process?
Automating the 300 plus territories for daily runs made the eight-to-twelve-hour daily process, by two employees, a twenty-minute process each day.
RPA automated the extraction of the Excel files, defined by the developer, and automatically updated the information in the system. Our client was given a cost-effective way to execute reports and files while freeing up great employees to focus on more important projects. The RPA also forecasts the plan payouts that were more difficult to project due to the changing territories.
The time savings looks like this in this case: 2,080-3,120 hours per year on these daily reports was reduced to 86.67 hours per year on the same reports. The efficiency of the RPA process was also able to account for changing territories and less confusion that often accompanied the manual entry of data.
Additional challenges met by Lanshore’s RPA solution
Our client had annual Final Territory Reports that had to be run for various reasons at end of the year: Tax purposes, profit loss, building a game plan for the next year, sending financial documents to various entities and individuals, etc.
The level of these final reports was in-depth and included many data-driven checks and balances that took painstaking time to complete. The original process time was three full weeks of work, eight-plus hours per day, by two people.
The employees dreaded this time of year and finalizing these reports because it was very tedious monotonous number crunching. Lanshore created an RPA process that was able to successfully finish the 240 hours’ worth of work in a mere 4 hours. The employees expressed gratitude that they didn’t have to spend weeks doing these final reports anymore.
This next bit is technical but included to show the scope of RPA. Our client didn’t have the ability to download the definition of territories from the UI, as SAP didn’t have that feature. Not all of their Compensation Admins have access to UI or know how to use the Callidus system.
This made territory exporting almost impossible to achieve, but necessary for daily work to be accomplished. Through implementation of RPA, Lanshore has automated the login process to UI and gave RPA the ability to copy/paste the territories into an Excel spreadsheet.
The bot only takes five minutes to do this, allowing Compensation Admins to use this file for their investigations and modifications without delays in the process.
Our client has an extensive look-up table with 50 indexes. The table expands annually with additional indexes. Our client’s employees had to version each cell, add new values, replacing any old cells, which is a time-consuming process. Human error in these processes skews any results. This process would take three days to complete, when it was necessary, and included a human error.
Lanshore’s RPA solution efficiently added all necessary cells and info, updated the values, without any error, in just two hours (instead of the 24 hours manually, with mistakes). Compensation Admins were able to utilize the reports and compare against original values much more quickly and come to closure on validations.