ALG Worldwide, an industry leader in various specialized transportation services for domestic and international freight forwarding, knew they had to adopt new technologies to sustain their current demand and also to grow. They did extensive research on new automation technologies that could perform a number of their current transactions, such as Track and Trace, AR Invoicing and AP Invoicing.

What they discovered was Robotic Process Automation (RPA) combined with Machine Learning was successfully doing automation for these types of business processes and transactions for many different organizations.

They carefully selected a partner and an RPA and Machine Learning platform, and began work on their first automation, the FedEx shipment tracking process. This automation captured order information from FedEx and entered that information into their ERP system, delivering impressive results that led them to quickly selecting their next process for automation, Sales Order Invoicing.

Sales Order Invoicing required invoicing for four different entities within ALG and nine different invoice formats. This automation, like their first, was rolled out quickly and delivered impressive and immediate returns, streamlining the Accounts Receivable process.

The next two projects focused on AP Invoicing, their highest volume business process and also the most complex. The first AP project gave visibility and the ability to update all invoices. The second AP project drilled down further by providing functionality regarding their “Agents”, the most time consuming and difficult part of their entire AP Invoice process.

Holland LP, a dedicated engineering-based company servicing the railroad and related industries founded in 1935, was experiencing an increased amount of time for data entry and validation of their billing, especially with their largest client.

Their existing accounting staff and IT simply could not keep up with the new requirements their customers were requesting and industry-related regulations that continued to grow and change. So Finance and Accounting took ownership of finding technology to help with this issue.

Like many other companies today, they chose Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to solve this problem, as RPA is tailor made for manually intensive, high volume transaction processing.

They chose to automate the billing process for their biggest customer for work performed by their biggest division. The existing billing process consisted of a homegrown billing system generating charges for time and materials. These charges were then entered in the customer portal, which performed extensive validation and then rejected the charges if they did not meet requirements.

Once the charges were validated, they were then entered in the customer portal and the customer was invoiced. Upon completion of that, the invoice was then created in the Holland ERP system.

The new automated system performs the above process but validates the charges BEFORE they are submitted to the customer, saving substantial time and improving the customer experience greatly, as back and forth dialogue about billing requirements by Holland and the customer is now eliminated.

This automation is currently saving Holland 20+ hours per week and has improved data integrity greatly. Holland has just completed their second automation and has started working on their third automation, for their second biggest customer.

Specialty Steel Works Incorporated (SSWI), headquartered in Hammond, IN, is one of North America’s leading independent manufacturers of specialty steel products. SSWI is dedicated to maximizing the value of its subsidiaries through strategic capital investments that serve to drive innovation, enhance operations, and facilitate growth. The company’s drive for innovation led to the utilization of automation technologies to enhance existing business processes and help to absorb attrition.

Rebecca Earl, Shared Service & Treasury Manager at SSWI, is a CPA who coordinates the consolidated Accounting and corporate support functions for SSWI and its subsidiaries. The ongoing need for continual improvement and inevitable organizational changes has led Rebecca to don many hats within the company. From Accounting to Financial Reporting to HR/Payroll to systems implementations, Rebecca has dug in, adapted, and supported many functions.

Seeing the need to help drive innovation, without the assistance of her overly taxed IT Department, Rebecca dove into learning RPA on her own with a hands-on approach. She created her first functional automation to clear AP checks while working through the beginner’s level training courses for automation SDK (Software Designer Kit) UiPath Studio and has moved on to automate several additional business processes.

Weekly GM Spend Reports

Process: Download Production and Accounts Payable activity from multiple reports for 4 separate locations. Take downloaded data, and input into multiple tabs of templates by spend category for each plant. Update all pivot tables and report totals then hardcode and email out to plant distribution.

Benefits: This was an entirely manual process requiring the manual download of the reports for each of the plants and then filtering and sorting before copying into report templates. This was a time-consuming process that could take a few hours each week to complete.

Rebecca is currently looking at repurposing existing automations for new tasks as well as driving continual improvement with possible process change automations.