Reaping rewards with Intelligent Automation

Over the past few years, the company has grown rapidly, and challenges started appearing as it became increasingly difficult to keep up with the required work. In particular, there was an issue of manually performed and repetitive tasks that consumed an excessive amount of time and resources. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 also provided an extra push for the firm to invest in technology and automation, not just for efficiency reasons but for health reasons too.

Overcoming technological barriers

As more and more team members saw and understood the power of automating trivial processes, anxiety about RPA melted away and we were quickly inundated with ideas and requests for more RPA deployments.

Michael Kyriakidis - Head of Presales

Michael Kyriakidis was put in charge of such a project, as the Head of Presales at INFORM Group, whose background with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) went back almost a decade to 2012. Having used and benefitted from RPA for so many years, Michael set about establishing a Centre of Excellence (CoE).

The CoE established a framework of protocols and provided training and support to its separate divisions embarked upon RPA journeys. -, UiPath’s tools include both attended and unattended robots, which offered flexibility and scalability for the company.

Taking the first step

AustriaCard’s first RPA deployment was implemented for their Sales Order Creation process. This laborious work involved an entire team of staff compiling sales orders, extracting the data to multiple Excel sheets, then aggregating them into SAP software - all of which necessitated a significant amount of time and effort.

So, the company used RPA robots to undertake all of the steps in the process, such as reading each transaction code file one by one or putting the files directly onto their public folder and SAP platform. They even got robots to send e-mails at the end of the day with prepared lists of sales orders ready to go. Before RPA, this process would happen twice a day, with UiPath RPA robots, they now execute these processes five times a day and the saved Man Days per year is approximately 250.

Not only was this a technical success in and of itself, but it provided proof that RPA would make employees’ lives better, not replace them. CoE demonstrated that RPA would remove or reduce much of the boring, mundane work that they did, allowing them to concentrate on more interesting and value-added work.

Creating momentum from internal processes to their customers

Through the use of the Center of Excellence, many more RPA processes will be automated within the organization in the coming years, enhancing efficiency and productivity across all of our business divisions.

Kostas Fiakas - CSO

As interest grew colleagues would approach the team and ask how they could leverage RPA. One such example involved the HR team and their existing system of measuring employee work hours. Previously, as employees clocked in and out at the beginning and end of their working days, HR employees would have to manually extract the times and input them into an excel spreadsheet. This process took hours, was extremely mundane and often led to errors as the data would be inputted incorrectly etc.

The company automated this process using UiPath RPA robots. Robots would automatically extract the data and copy-paste the timings into an excel spreadsheet. This alone saved a huge amount of man hours for the HR team, who could then concentrate on finding and recruiting great talent for the organization.

Reflecting on their RPA journey and going forward

In the coming years, the organization aims to expand its use of RPA and related technology to all its partner countries beyond Romania and Greece.

With the goal of forming a virtual team of members from around the world, the Center of Excellence will be crucial in ensuring comprehensive automation of all parts of the organization and exploring more advanced technologies beyond RPA as AustriaCard leverages UiPath hard working RPA robots to reduce workload.

Data points:

• >2000-man days saved over three years thanks to RPA

• 150% increase of processes handling frequency

• 100% accuracy in process handling

• Increased employee satisfaction

UiPath tools have assisted us in beginning the Digital Transformation within our Group. Our vision is to continue automating mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing up human capital to focus on more value-added activities, thus increasing productivity and efficiency. Additionally, our aim is to continue rationalizing our cost base and improving accuracy, which will lead to enhanced customer experiences and increased profitability.

Manolis Kontos - CEO