The Problem
A shared services center operating across Latin America spent roughly 45 minutes per country processing purchase orders, at least twice a day. Orders arrived continuously throughout the day and were stored in internal folders as text files.
Staff manually reviewed each order to verify its accuracy (products, quantities, dates, etc.) and reformatted the data to upload it into SAP along with its supporting documentation.
The challenge was to give that time back to employees so they could invest it in higher value-added tasks, reducing operating costs and potential errors.
The Process
We worked hand in hand with the purchase order team to identify the details of the process and its main pain points. The key points to account for in the automation were:
- 1Read every purchase order without skipping any.
- 2Run validations (existing products, valid quantities, customers, addresses).
- 3Create a consolidated format for uploading into SAP.
- 4Automatically download reports for verification.
Results Achieved
98% 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.