Synopsis
Vendors—single or multiple—exist in every—small to large—enterprise. Vendor Management System (VMS) helps businesses to manage vendor-related processes such as vendor onboarding, vendor-buyer relationship, vendor performance, payments, etc. Vendor Management Automation helps companies perform operations faster, accurately, and efficiently and remove errors. Manual evaluation and performance review of vendors regularly or quarterly includes high data maintenance and puts an unreasonable burden on the concerned department. However, with RPA in the vendor management system, companies can remove this burden and free up their valuable resources for value-added tasks. RPA implementation into vendor management systems also helps companies to remain competitive in the market, mitigate risk, and save cost. It also helps business leaders keep vendors’ performance in check and remove poor suppliers that slow down the business. A clear view of the vendor’s performance also helps build the vendor-buyer relationship, strengthening the cord with the strategic third party.
About the Client
Our client is one of India’s leading renewable energy companies by operational capacity. The company has been here for a decade and has managed to rank itself among the top 10 Renewable Energy companies internationally. They have more than a hundred operational utilities in PAN India, dealing with commercial and industrial customers.
Key Issue
Our client has a scrupulous Vendor performance management system, requiring them to evaluate each vendor manually. They receive vendor-related data on their VMS from respective departments, and manual evaluation of vendor performance leads to delays, rendering respective departments unable to process orders with respective vendors. Therefore, they needed a vendor management automation solution to resolve these issues for better functioning.
Our Solution
The client quickly realized the need to integrate a vendor management automation solution into its vendor management system. Therefore, upon a thorough evaluation of multiple RPA players in the market, they reached out to RPATech to extend the hands for partnership and digitalize its process and automate the end-to-end vendor performance management system. RPATech evaluated the current operating of the process and created a detailed automation workflow for RPA implementation using its in-house methodology—D3OTM and AugurDTM—and configured an RPA Bot, customized as per the client’s business operations.
Following are the actions that the Bot performed:
- The Bot logs in to SAP and identifies the commodities with quarterly frequency.
- Then it generates a report, identifies the products with goods received notes (GRN), and validates them against the previously generated report.
- After that, it identifies each purchase order and passes the respective line items to Ariba.
- Next, it initiates vendor performance evaluation in Ariba. There are 3 scenarios in which the Bot acts.
- Scenario 1: When there is a delay, the Bot sends a reminder notice to the stakeholder.
- Scenario 2: When the performance management system is approved, the Bot asks to change the status to ‘no action.’
- Scenario 3: When the performance management system is rejected, the Bot moves the supplier to the relevant section, disqualifying the vendor.
Automation Benefits
Following are the outcomes of Vendor Management Automation implementation:
- Backlogs were eliminated by 100%.
- No human intervention.
- 50% reduction in turnaround time.
- Vendor-buyer relationship only with quality and strategic vendors.
- Placement of orders on time.
