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RPA Deployment at Electrocomponents

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Electrocomponents plc is a British-based distributor of industrial and electronics products. Founded in 1937, the company is a global omnichannel provider of industrial and electronic products and solutions with over one million customers in more than 80 countries worldwide. This is a story of how Electrocomponents benefitted from RPA.

Goals

“Organizations often approach RPA for financial benefits. And, those are important. You also need to think about wider business benefits. We want automation to help us do more work and provide a better service by freeing up and supporting our employees. For us, RPA is about empowering our existing people to work with more suppliers and serve more customers.”

Greg Lee-Podgorski, Head of Automaton, Machine Learning & Technology Platforms

Vendor
The company selected UiPath as their solutions partner because of the product quality and ease of use, range of integrations and partners, as well as their customer success offering.

Solution
The results of the Proof of Concept were that RPA had great potential and UiPath was the best solution. Before moving into creating new automations, the company began to work through what it calls the three B’s of RPA:

  • Build the infrastructure
  • Build the team
  • Build the robots

In the last stage, the company has created a robot, using the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform that processes and updates the inventory codes for all products within its ERP system. With up to 30,000 different inventory code changes per request, the fast and accurate updating of data is essential. Automating this single process has increased the accuracy of data and cut the lead-time for inventory management by 50%.

Another software robot uses shipping numbers and customer account numbers to continually check that orders are being shipped in a timely manner. When it spots a discrepancy, the robot automatically escalates those that need priority – such as those with an expiry date that require immediate shipping and fragile items that shouldn’t remain on the warehouse floor for long periods of time. This automation has reduced the shipping cycle of certain product ranges in the UK by 20%.

Overall, Electrocomponents has now deployed over 50 robots across its business globally and the company is now accelerating its adoption of RPA.

Outcome

  • Over 6,000 hours returned back to the business initially. By now tens of thousand hours have been returned.
  • Leading times for inventory management cut in half
  • Product shipping cycle times reduced by 20%


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