CASE STUDY: ONBOARDING VENDORS
90% TIME SAVINGS
ROI IN 12 MONTHS
BOT DEVELOPED IN DAYS
OVERVIEW
This aerospace manufacturing firm dealt with a number of small-order and one-off production that
meant they often required bespoke and unusual material. In following stringent aerospace standards
(AS9100D) they needed to properly vet any supplier. The delay in doing so often had operational and
delivery consequences and so any process which could save time would aid production.
CHALLENGES
The challenge with this project was educating the business where none of the major stakeholders or
teams had knowledge of automation and the different technologies available. The small back-office
procurement team saw automation as a threat to their jobs, but once we had delivered a training
session and they understood that the technology would simply reduce manual tasks and this would
actually leave them with more time to develop building relationships
WE DELIVERED
In order to educate the client, and in order to facilitate a longer term plan where they would be able
to oversee automation internally, Proservartner ran a series of workshops aimed at educating the
team on the technology, how to identify processes for automation and overall structure needed.
We were able to build a bot using Robotic Process Automation (Uipath) which extracted data from
the service provider tool, validated VAT, IBAN, USPS, ABN and checked for duplicate entries within the
ERP. Above and beyond this, the bot also handled vendor creation, changes, blocks, and extensions in
SAP FIP following country specific rules (European and non-European).
OUR RESULTS
Before the automation the team needed to onboard around 50 new suppliers each month, which
took around 20 minutes each time, adding up to 2 business days a month and a yearly cost of around
£3000. We were able to achieve a return on investment in 12 months, but moreover freed up time for
procurement to take a more strategic management role with vendors served by live data and less
time doing low-level tasks