Building a high-speed finance organization using robotic process automation

Challenges

Adidas Group is one of the world’s largest and most famous sportswear retailers. It goes without saying that managing the back-office for such an enormous organization is quite the undertaking. All support functions, the finance organization in particular, need to continuously strive for speed and quality in the vast amounts of information they process each day.

 

The Adidas Group finance organization faced multiple concerns it needed to respond to:

• remove error-prone and tedious replication of data between formats and systems;

• remove time-consuming transactional steps such as mass-downloads and uploads;

• reduce the amount of unnecessary variants to a process but enforce the remaining ones.

 

Adidas Group reached out to us to pilot the Robotic Process Automation solution UiPath on a selection of cases.

 

The selfthink solution

Digital Innovation provides UiPath development services as part of its broader selfthink offering, which covers Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). We delivered an end-to-end automation on UiPath for two cases, one in the area of accounting and one in the area of controlling.

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Because of our great developer experience and the multi-disciplinary team setup, each bot has been delivered within three weeks.

 

UiPath: Powerful and self-explanatory

The cases showed the extensive capabilities of market leading software UiPath. Without any doubt the most prominent advantage is its user-friendly development environment UiPath Studio, which excels in its clarity and documentation capabilities to such extent that its flows are a great starting point for discussion between the development team and business users. Contrary to other RPA solutions, one is not afraid to look back at a process flow created earlier to establish what it exactly does. For enterprise-level use it is a great RPA solution.

 

Showcasing stronghold

Digital Innovation's architectural backbone stronghold enforces principles on everything we develop. These are the two main architectural concerns we had to actively manage during this project:

• compatibility: the allocation of concerns to software types (e.g. business rules by the business engine, UI manipulation by the RPA tooling);

• scalability: designing the processes in such a way the solution could be deployed on multiple bots, enabling parallel processing and huge speed gains.

 

Results, return on investment and future plans

These implemented processes formed part of a pilot program initiated by the Adidas Group finance organization. If implemented on a parallel infrastructure, Robotic Process Automation has huge time and quality gains. When rolling out an RPA solution, you need to consider how you will integrate it into the business process as a whole. To this end, a link needs to be made with orchestration software to handle data quality and business complexity. Digital Innovation also provides these services as part of its powerflow offering, which was specifically set up for Adidas.