Template: Community Blueprint

[Michael_S]

Give your Blueprint a title by describing what it aims to achieve (then delete this line ⬅️):
Automatically transfer Purchase Orders from .csv to online finance tool

Which industry did you deploy this use case in?

• Retail

Which functional area / department within the organization benefitted most from this automation?

• Finance

Which SS&C Blue Prism tools did you use?

• SS&C Blue Prism
• Decipher IDP

Describe the problem your automation aimed to solve

Our finance team had a large backlog of purchase order information which needed to be transferred from .csv files to a newly adopted, online spend management tool. Rather than pay the vendor of this tool to transfer the information into the new system, we opted to use RPA to save the business the $12,000 data migration cost.

Provide a brief, step-by-step outline of how you set up your automation

Step 1: Discovery

The team met with our finance team to understand how the data was structured, how it needed to be entered into the new tool and what inconsistencies exist between the 2 platforms

Step 2: Design

We knew that this automation would only run once, so we needed to ensure we did as much troubleshooting and exception handling in advance as possible. We also knew that this automation could be attended, since it would likely never need to run on a schedule.

Step 3: Build

The team first built a process to extract the data needed from the .csv file, then check it was compatible with the online tool (and make alterations if not) and alert a human should it find an exception which could not be addressed automatically.

We then built the process to take each record and enter it into the online tool.

Step 4: QA

Since we only wanted to run this automation once, we heavily peer-reviewed the process flows, which allowed fresh eyes to spot multiple issues which may have slowed down our run

Step 5: Run

We ran the process, handled exceptions and built in fixes along the way to prevent exceptions from re-occuring

Step 6: QA

Our finance team checked a sample of the records submitted for accuracy.

What were the main challenges you faced during this project, and how did you overcome them?

Our robots work faster than the web tool could handle, and caused spam / DDoS prevention mechanisms to be activated by the vendor. We solved this by collaborating with the vendor to temporarily lower protections whilst the automation ran, and built in delay time to prevent database issues in the vendor's system. 

What was the impact of your project?

We saved the business $12,000 in professional services costs, at the expense of 12 working hours from our automations team. The total cost saving was roughly $10,000. We also saved our finance team's sanity, by removing the need for them to copy and paste records from Excel into the new tool!

Additional information

You should use this section to provide any extra detail that others who are considering this use case might find useful. You could:

• Include screenshots of your process flow
• Share the VBOs you used from the Digital Exchange
• Provide advice for anyone who wishes to follow in your footsteps

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💙 Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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