Automating the processes of Ardo, the “Silicon Valley of fruits and vegetables”
Ardo’s general mission is to preserve nature’s gifts as much as possible and to turn them into delicious end products. If you’re eating vegetables as a side dish tonight, chances are high they are an Ardo product. Ardo exports to more than 100 countries and aims to deliver the best quality. To be able to do that, they started a full digital transformation program.
This program is where RoboRana comes in: the use of RPA could not be missed in a true business transformation. To begin, an in-depth analysis of Ardo’s various business processes made several things clear: they have too much manual work and paper trail, in addition to too little efficiency. Our conclusion was that process automation was necessary. On top of that, Ardo aimed for more standardization of their IT infrastructure, for example by creating a global ERP system for all the Ardo entities worldwide.
Process discovery workshop
Before we could automate Ardo’s processes, a process discovery workshop was organized. Together with Ardo we mapped all highly repetitive tasks. The result of this analysis led to a ranking of the different processes, based on efficiency gain. This means that we focus on the FTE that are released by automating certain tasks. Using this classification, we started automating processes.
Currently, we’re taking care of the roll-out of all the automation processes in Belgium. Subsequently, we’ll extend this automation infrastructure to the foreign business units of Ardo, starting with the UK and Canada. In this way, we build a centralized center of excellence in Belgium, which can be used in the long run to fulfill all the automation needs of the different business units.
Used technologies
We started with a profound analysis of each process. Together with both the process owner and the process stakeholders, we looked at how the process is performed manually and the various possibilities to optimize it and make it more efficient.
Afterwards, we describe the process in detail, identifying which applications, screens, buttons and fields are needed. Once this document is validated by the process owner, we started deploying the automation, using the following technologies:
- Blue Prism: the technology we use to automate the different processes
- Microsoft Power Platform
- VBA (Excel Macros): used to build a calculation tool in Excel in order to standardize the cost calculation process for the different business units
Metrics
We automated 7 processes for the following departments: Finance & Accounting, Logistics & Supply Chain, Master Data and Customer Support. So, what does this mean? How much time is saved, for example? We have laid it all out for you!
Turnaround time of a process:
On average, manual processing took 5 minutes. By robot, this only took 2 minutes, which is a time reduction of 60%. This means that since the beginning of this year, 485 hours of manual work have been saved.
Below, you can see a process overview of Ardo’s success metrics and how much efficiency is gained.
Through automation, the lead time of the following processes has decreased:
- Processing of storage documents: from 10 to 3 minutes
- Printing of invoices: from 1 minute to 13 seconds
- Verifying of IBAN numbers: from 1 minute to 14 seconds
- Master data entry: from 2 hours to 15 minutes
- Entry of invoices in ERP system: from 5 minutes to 1 ½ minute
The key result of this automation solution is that we freed up substantial time for more value adding tasks.
Curious to see what the effect of automation on your business could be? Contact us!
