The Problem
Purchase orders are blocked in the system on a daily basis, and the blocked orders have to be reviewed manually. The process involves: logging into the system (SAP), reviewing the blocked orders, understanding the reasons for the block, sending an approval to release them where applicable, and releasing them once approved. In a shared services center serving the entire Latin American market, this task can take 30-40 minutes per market and is performed 2-3 times a day.
The challenge was to download, organize, and compare the information to obtain the reasons for the block without manual intervention.
The Process
With the support of the credit and collections team, we understood the details of the process and the most common potential errors, and based on this we established the step-by-step of the process. The points to account for in the automation were:
- 1Download all the purchase orders blocked in the system.
- 2Download every customer's receivables and organize them by due dates and document types.
- 3Download the maximum approved credit limit for each customer and compare it against their current total receivables.
- 4According to the approval standards, assign the corresponding approver depending on the approval amount and the type of block.
- 5Organize the email with all the necessary information so the receivables team can add the final comments and send it to the corresponding approver.
Results Achieved
88% time saved
A process that previously took around 9 hours a day (across all countries) was reduced to 30 minutes.
Error Elimination
Because the process is automated, potential human errors were eliminated across the entire task.