Remember that process from Monday’s post, where a CRM Agent had to follow a 9-step process, including steps from the 1990s such as “Print everything out” and “Carry documents to AP”?
Here’s how that process changed with automation; extracts from the case study:
“The company faced two challenges as it explored solutions. “It was too costly to create APIs for our legacy applications like SAP and others, and we also had to navigate a third-party website,” explains Allan McDaniel, Manager of Development for BI and Master Data at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United.
“We used Power Automate RPA bots to fill these gaps and automate the process.” His team developed a master automated service agent they’ve dubbed “Asa,”.
Now, when a CRM agent enters an order into the CRM system, Asa takes it from there and signs in to the company’s SAP system without human intervention. Asa accesses orders, which are now tracked in a Microsoft Azure SQL database rather than in an Excel spreadsheet.
Asa reads the database and creates a PO in the company’s SAP system. Asa then submits the order to the supplier’s web application, validates successful entry, monitors the email system for invoice and delivery emails, matches them to the correct order, and then stores the attachments in Azure Blob Storage for future reference.
After that, Asa uses form processing in AI Builder to extract information from those email attachments that’s necessary to close the process in the Accounts Payable system, and finally, it releases the invoice and PO from SAP.
These steps occur with bots within the Asa bot running in unattended mode, a key capability of Power Automate RPA that takes mundane, tedious tasks from humans and shifts them to bots.”
The case study goes on to say how developing Asa saved the need to hire 10 full-time employees, and that the existing CRM agent is now free to do other things.
Read the full case study https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/845187-coca-cola-bottling-company-united-consumer-goods-power-automate
