Stoneridge Slashes their Automation Implementation Timeline in Half with UiPath Task Mining

When you are a global manufacturer with a reputation for product innovation, your back-office processes need to keep pace with improvements in the factory. With UiPath Task Mining, Stoneridge has been able to map out business processes to simplify and accelerate automation. 

Stoneridge has over 50 years of experience designing and manufacturing highly engineered electrical and electronic systems, components, and modules for the transportation market. The company has a long history of working with customers to create technology that powers vehicle intelligence, increases fuel efficiency, reduces emissions, and improves safety and security. This same drive to innovate new technologies extends to internal operations as well, which is why Stoneridge has been using UiPath automation and Task Mining to assess business processes as part of an automation strategy.

As early technology adopters, Stoneridge is committed to modernizing business processes to achieve optimal efficiency and cost savings. That’s why Stoneridge became a UiPath customer in 2020.

Stoneridge and their partner Neostella first decided to apply UiPath automation to selected finance and accounting tasks, such as data searches and journal entries. Using accounting as a proving ground for automation would promote organizational awareness and start building capabilities to automate additional business processes.

Within the first year, Stoneridge was seeing substantial benefits from automation.

When it comes to automation, if you’re not doing work, then you’re a winner.

Bob Hartman, Chief Account Officer, Stoneridge 

Now Hartman is looking ahead to determine what’s next for Stoneridge’s automation strategy.

Automating Process Documentation 

Stoneridge’s early automation successes have had a significant impact on everything from accounting to processing reports. Automation has also transformed business processes such as translating both ADP payroll and Certify travel and expense data into J.D. Edwards journal entries. Automation saves the company valuable time and resources, especially during critical financial close periods.

Building on these early successes, Stoneridge is now expanding its automation development to other critical, complex business processes. For example, the Stoneridge accounts payable (AP) team is responsible for managing a complex set of processes that span global operations. These processes were well-defined, but the challenge was how to automate those functions, especially how to translate data so a robot could process it.

The Stoneridge team needed a detailed map of their existing tasks to automate those AP processes. They could accelerate automation development efforts by mapping out a clearly defined workflow using UiPath Task Mining.

Mapping Processes with Task Mining 

Hartman and his team, in partnership with Neostella, launched a Task Mining study to speed up the discovery process and map out AP workflows for potential automation. The goal was to capture existing workflow processes and to gather information from process experts without being disruptive.

We had not prioritized documenting our processes in detail, but Task Mining enabled us to easily layout our as-is processes – clearly framing them at the level of specificity needed for our RPA developers.

Bob Hartman, Chief Account Officer, Stoneridge 

Hartman’s team applied their previous experience developing automations with Neostella to map three business-critical processes in two weeks. Using Task Mining, the team captured all the steps and variations in these three processes:

Intercompany invoicing—Invoicing and communications of all intercompany charges at the end of the month require much human interaction. This highly repetitive, rules-based process provided a great opportunity for a robot to assist while reducing overtime expenses during financial close.

Accounts payable—Coding and entry of invoices into J.D. Edwards was highly time intensive. Automating the coding of invoices and matching them to the appropriate expense eliminated one of the most time-intensive manual tasks facing the corporate finance team each month.

LeaseQuery and OneStream lease account reconciliations–Using Task Mining, the team documented the existing “as-is” reconciliation process sourcing data from two separate financial systems, laying the foundation for automating these account reconciliations at all Stoneridge locations.

By applying UiPath Task Mining, Stoneridge reduced the time needed to discover and document these processes by 75%. The team now could make better-informed decisions about how to standardize business processes, accelerating automation time to value by cutting their development-to-deployment times in half.

Task Mining is our automation accelerator. Once we started thinking about which processes to automate across different facilities and different languages, we knew we absolutely needed a tool like Task Mining.

Bob Hartman, Chief Account Officer, Stoneridge 

Stoneridge plans to expand its Task Mining initiative to standardize operations worldwide. “Meaningful data on your business is always wonderful to have,” said Hartman, “and Task Mining is one of the best tools that deliver it.”