on - edited on by
Michael_S
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Using RPA and Google Apps to improve carrier communication
Which industry did you deploy this use case in?
- Transportation and Logistics
Which functional area / department within the organization benefitted most from this automation?
- Operations, Supply Chain
Which SS&C Blue Prism tools did you use?
- SS&C Blue Prism Cloud
Describe the problem your automation aimed to solve
In our industry, the pre-pickup process is an important step to ensure all necessary preparations have been made before the shipment is picked up by a carrier. The time between when a carrier is contracted for a load and the pickup date has a direct impact on the potential margin - especially if the contracted carrier is unable to pick up the load in the designated time frame. And since sales reps could have 600 loads to check on per month, it was difficult to proactively reach out to carriers.
Provide a brief, step-by-step outline of how you set up your automation
- First, SS&C Blue Prism digital workers receive and review a spreadsheet containing data on loads due to be picked up in the next 24 hours.
- The bots then use information from the spreadsheet to build an email template using a Gmail API - with a Google connector that we downloaded from the Digital Exchange (DX).
- Once the email is written up, digital workers send it to the carrier and request the carrier's confirmation on the pick-up date and time.
- The email is sent from each sales representative's Gmail account, so the name in the customer's inbox is familiar so we are more likely to receive a response from the customer.
- Since we complete this process entirely through APIs and, we can reliably gather data on each load and send out an email within five seconds.
What were the main challenges you faced during this project, and how did you overcome them?
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Understanding Google Workspace access and security. In order to send emails from employees' Gmail accounts without needing their password we had to create a service account with Domain-wide delegation in our Google Workspace admin panel, so we needed legal and IT assistance to get things going.
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Getting the access token from Google API. This is no simple task, but fortunately we have this connector available on the Digital Exchange. The Google Cloud Authentication VBO was really easy to use because it abstracted all the logic/integration needed to receive an access token from the API and made our implementation must faster. I'd say this is a must use when you work with Google Workspace.
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Working with Gmail API. This also was not straightforward, so we had to dig a little deeper into the documentation to understand what was available. We were able to leverage this connector for the Gmail API which made things easier because we just had to edit and provide our input parameters to an already configured WEB API Object.
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Tracking Email Responses. This is not one of the features of the Gmail API but was a feature needed in this project, so to be able to track this information we leveraged the use of Tags and Status on a Blue Prism Queue that stored a threadID from the original email. Using this information, we were capable of tracing all the interactions within a thread in Gmail and come up with our Response Rate KPI to check the effectiveness our wording/email templating.
What was the impact of your project?
We've had a positive response from carriers and experienced a 50% decrease in profit margin loss due to dropped loads. We also have more time to update the carriers and have reduced our sales team's workload.
We've also realized these tangible benefits:
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$648k annualized impact on gross profits
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$50k annualized impact to efficiency
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29.63% decrease in average margin decay per load (from $113.53 to $79.89)
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1500 hours (187 days) back to the business each year
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Guilherme Gorges
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