Robotic process automation

Our top-secret client (no, it's not the Swedish military) is a major player in the manufacturing industry and is constantly looking to improve its performance and efficiency.

To first understand the client better, we transformed Meta Bytes into a manufacturing company and embarked on a 15-year journey to Ethiopia to understand the ancient methods of...

Sorry, I got carried away! Where were we? Right, customer value and domain expertise.

To understand the customer better and deliver value iteratively, we first built a PoC (Proof of Concept) to perform various repetitive tasks in the customer's finance department, freeing up time for several key employees. The customer has a legacy ERP system and as automation can be quite complex in such a system, we decided to build a software robot (RPA). This robot partially performed its tasks via the same user interface as the staff, while keeping the business logic and rules intact.

This has been a learning experience for both us and the client and we are now in the starting phase to create a strategy and ecosystem for a move from the old, heavily customised ERP system to a cloud-based one without spending money and development time twice on optimizing the same business processes and business domains in both the new and old systems.

This client is unique but not when it comes to the set of challenges and obstacles they face. Here are some key takeaways which are the same for many (if not most) of our enterprise clients:

• Continuous improvements – don't do it all at once! Your business is not a single solid piece but a set of moving pieces which all can be improved independently if the right approach is used.

• Are you building systems or are you building an ecosystem? Just as your business has different pieces working together towards a bigger goal you need your system domains and architecture to reflect that so that the pieces become part of a bigger ecosystem instead of scattered ad-hoc solutions.

• Off-the-shelf solutions like big ERP systems are built for the masses, it will not solve and apply your business rules without customization. To keep your business logic and rules intact for any given upgrade/change, make sure your ERP of choice is only part of your ecosystem and not the whole ecosystem by itself.
  

Value delivered:

• 102.5 jokes (in our mind at least).
  

• The kickstart for a new mindset within the business.

• This cool short film.