Robots are not yet widely used in areas such as purchasing. However, the experience of implementing automatic software assistants shows that their use can give not only a tangible, but a revolutionary effect.
Purchase by hand
The structural divisions of companies responsible for purchasing, as a rule, deal with two categories of purchased goods.
Along with raw materials, tools, equipment – necessary and critical for production – they also have to deal with routine tasks. For example, in the purchase of office supplies, paper, tools and many other non-priority product items, do not require gentle methods and are bought regularly.
Naturally, the purchase of product groups that are critical for the company’s business requires the greatest attention of specialists who precede them, postponing the implementation of non-priority orders.
But this forced prioritization creates queues, leads to delivery delays or the regularity of deliveries of non-priority items and, finally, leads to serious problems.
How to implement robots
It is the liberation of employees in departments responsible for purchasing from performing mass routine operations that do not require serious skills that has become the main factor driving the automation of purchasing activities with the help of robots.
They “take over” operations related to documenting purchases, and retrieving prices, delivery times, data from supplier companies, and selecting the best offers. At the same time, the product groups dealt with by robots do not differ in many complex characteristics, the control of which is carried out according to formal criteria.
The nature of the automation of procurement activities is not different from that of automation in other areas of business activity. This makes procurement automation a task that can be solved by the company itself.
The condition for this is that it has the appropriate resources: a group of qualified specialists capable of implementing and configuring software robots and the necessary integration of information systems. It will also take time to implement automation.
Finally, let’s not forget about the willingness of management to redistribute responsibilities to employees who were previously involved in routine operations.
However, such opportunities are not always available, including companies that develop skills in the field of information technology. The most “scarce” resource here is the time in which employees who will implement a project to robotize procurement activities are distracted from their main responsibilities.
Traditionally, in such cases, a contractor is involved in the implementation of the project, whose selection criteria include capabilities, provision of system maintenance after its implementation, support, and the opportunity to work on its further development. .
Hiring an external contractor to implement a project to automate procurement activities makes sense for another reason. This is the implementation of complex purchasing automation scenarios. As an example, we can mention the cases where the purchase related to tender procedures is also automated.
A company may use electronic trading platforms (ETP) for purchases, of which there may be many. To interact with them, the systems used by the company are integrated, where requests and proposals are exchanged with the counterparts. The use of robots here promises a significant increase in efficiency.
The second difficult scenario for the use of robots is solving problems related to the preparation and verification of procurement documentation. One of the parts of this work is to update legal regulatory actions. It is a labor-intensive process that requires maximum attention from the performer, and there are high risks associated with the “human factor.”
How to increase purchasing efficiency many times
The advantage of robots is that their use becomes a reasonable and sufficient compromise for business in cases where it is necessary to reduce the use of manual labor and at the same time avoid difficult and expensive deep integration of systems.
In the field of procurement, robots are an easy-to-implement solution that can be easily integrated into an organization’s existing IT landscape and take into account existing areas of interaction with contractor
As an example, I can mention one of our projects to automate the procurement of a company that develops and produces drugs for the treatment of rare (orphan) diseases.
For production needs, a large number of different types of raw materials are purchased, and the main channel of communication with suppliers is e-mail (a case that is common in many companies). The information contained in the letters was transferred manually by the company’s managers to the 1C database.
Automating this work based on the integration of systems is almost impossible here. On the other hand, the use of robots makes it possible to free company specialists from a significant amount of manual operations.
It was decided to introduce four robots. The first, the receiving robot, which receives an application from company managers, makes a request for a commercial proposal and sends it to the supplier.
The second robot works with the answers: it reads the order number from them and creates a summary table for the order, sending it to the purchasing department manager for approval. After approval, the third robot fills out a purchase request and completes all the necessary documents.
Finally, the task of the fourth robot is to track the receipt of goods in the warehouse and send a request for payment.
Therefore, until now, shopping involves the participation of at least two people, each of whom must perform a number of routine operations.
The initiator collects the needs and makes a request for the supplier, the buyer sends the request to the suppliers, collects answers, creates a table of commercial proposals, executes approvals, creates an order, controls shipping and makes payments.
Now, when procurement is done using RPA, this huge sequence of time-consuming and labor-intensive manual operations is performed directly by the software assistant, and a person participates in it at the decision-making level or approval, if necessary a kind of conscious decision making.
Impact of robotization
The robotization of purchasing activities provides a company with many benefits. First of all, it is necessary to discuss the labor savings. Thanks to the aforementioned project, employees who previously spent half of their working time working on product categories now spend no more than 10% of the day on it.
Because of this, if before at least a week passed from making a purchase application to receiving the goods, now the time to complete the application is reduced to 2-3 days. Some of the procurement applications and, as a result, the general workload of specialists is also reduced.
Finally, the main advantage of this robotization scenario is the creation of opportunities for further development. The launched robots can be loaded with work with other product categories, and can be used in specific processes related to soft work or applications that require prepayment.
Thus, the company has the opportunity, without additional costs, simply by refining the scripts, to rebuild the business processes, increasing their efficiency.
Is the robot always right?
Always, because he strictly followed the script that was put to him. But the robot can fail. This is not due to deliberate actions or the “after cause”, but to a possible change in the operation of the company’s information systems.
They should lead to the reconfiguration of the robot. This relates to changes in the structure and composition of data, changes in the system interface, and changes related to access rights to information systems.
Easy to maintain. It is enough to strictly follow a simple rule: changes to the system must be accompanied, at least, by monitoring the operating scenarios of the robot and adjusting them if necessary.
Robotization of individual business processes is a relatively popular area of business digitalization. With its help, companies reduce the time needed to solve many problems, replace unproductive manual work with automated operations, and redistribute the working time of employees in favor of creating tasks that require the use of intelligence.
Many companies are skeptical about using robots in purchasing activities. In most cases, this is not due to a lack of trust in them, but a reluctance to implement robotization projects. Our experience shows that such fears are unfounded.
Yes, the project itself was carried out for six months, but these months were spent more on coordinating and synchronizing the RPA system with the IT department. The work itself, related to the implementation of the solution and the development of the scenarios, lasted 8 weeks. And the efficiency of such an important business area as procurement has increased many times.