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Case study

The challenge

A leading international agricultural and food company wanted to streamline its largely manual and fragmented order fulfillment, financial reporting and customer care processes using intelligent process automation (IPA). An end-to-end IPA solution would improve how it serves customers while reducing unit cost and cycle time, from procurement to final delivery. At the same time, the client expected the solution to scale globally and leverage existing resources whenever possible. The client also wanted to capture the expertise of business users who have a better understanding of specific process-related issues.

The client chose to partner with Cognizant for our expertise in manufacturing process automation and implementing IPA technologies, as well as our extensive experience in integrating automation with SAP and JD Edwards.

Our approach

Cognizant recommended a center of excellence (CoE) approach to ensure employee adoption of intelligent process automation across locations, as well as enable the client to evaluate and prioritize automation use cases based on feasibility and predicted return on investment (ROI). Use cases are vetted based on the client’s CoE criteria, and then implemented via a federated delivery model.

The CoE created bots to automate the client’s sales order process from end to end. Automation bots also streamline processes in customer care, contract management, pricelist creation, payment terms updates and order processing. Apart from this, the client leveraged the Cognizant Automation Center to automate more than 120 IT use cases in the areas of trading, operations and supply chain, human resources and corporate finance.

We created a framework to empower non-IT users (also known as citizen developers) to recommend and design bots to streamline processes, training more than 90 citizen developers in the client’s operations in Asia and Latin America.

Automation initiatives save time, deliver greater business flexibility

With continued support from Cognizant automation teams, the client’s citizen developers manage 80% of the automation development process. To date, they have created a variety of bots from a strong pipeline of automation processes. These automation initiatives save 52,000 hours per month, enabling associates to take on higher value projects. Automating the order entry and fulfillment processes improves handling time by 75% and saves 28,000 FTE hours annually.

As the intelligent process automation initiative continues to mature, there is a growing emphasis on reusable assets to further accelerate the automation of additional processes. We are also identifying other processes that are suitable for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

$20M

savings

More than 90%

process improvement

4X

return on investment