$18M saved and counting in 5 year RPA journey at Cargill

ABOUT

Cargill combines 156 years of experience with new technologies and insights to serve as a trusted partner for food, agriculture, financial and industrial customers in more than 125 countries. They are continuously developing products that give consumers what they’re seeking and helping their partners innovate and manage risk, so they can nourish the world again tomorrow.

THE CHALLENGE

With employees in 70 countries serving partners and customers in more than 125 countries, Cargill had processes in every business unit that weren’t standardized from region to region. This presented a tremendous opportunity for automation for the company to amalgamate the variations in processes and cut down on employees’ exhaustive manual labor and natural tendency for human error.

$18M

Savings to-date

600

Opportunities captured

236

Cumulative automations by FY2023

Automation can benefit the company beyond just FTE savings. It’s also Customer Satisfaction which is a huge opportunity for Cargill overall

-Bonnie Dallum, Global Intelligent Automation CoE Lead quote

THE SOLUTION

Cargill embarked on their RPA journey 5 years ago and, in that time, has deployed 236 automations across their business functions worldwide. Delivering on their mission to lead the organization to transform through intelligent automation, accelerate the IA roadmap, and drive adoption and scaling, the CoE has been able to accomplish wall-to-wall automation including 80 processes in Source-to-Pay alone, more than 50 processes in Order Entry, and many other highly valuable automations throughout the Trading, Finance, Transportation, IT, Human Resources, Planning, and Sales departments.

Processes Automated

Global Vendor Deactivation

Order Entry

Invoice Processing

THE WHOLE STORY

TA global supply chain presence, Cargill identified numerous opportunities to optimize their operational processes in order to not only save FTEs, but also improve partner satisfaction and customer retention. One automation in particular that served as a benchmark in this area dealt with order entry. Cargill needed to address the myriad of ways in which orders were received around the globe—from email attachments to photos of handwritten notes, all in different languages. They developed a solution with a blended approach, marrying the use of RPA and OCR. The resulting automation was able to process 50,000 orders annually and saved Customer Service Representatives valuable time.

Another noteworthy use case within the Source-to-Pay business function was single-handedly responsible for $1.2M savings in labor. Over 150,000 inactive vendor records were maintained in the company’s system and the company needed a way to quickly and efficiently deactivate those files. A onetime automation was developed to read the list of records, login to the ERPs, deactivate the records, and finally notify users. Not only was this one-time bot successful, but they also developed another bot for continuous maintenance of inactive vendors that has deactivated 268,000 records in total. This has freed up a significant amount of employee time and transformed the task into a 100% touchless process.

THE FUTURE

After 5 years and 236 automations and counting, one could say Cargill has established a mature, well-oiled RPA program, but they don’t plan to rest on their efforts any time soon. Thus far, their process discovery and pipeline has been fueled by a bottom-up approach. Moving forward, they’d like to flip this on its head by collaborating with executive-level business users to understand pain points in their critical processes and whether these roadblocks present opportunities for new automation use cases. Additionally, they are incorporating more process and task mining in their process discovery and exploring how Citizen Development might fit into their program in the future.

Our accumulated savings todate is $18M, and from idea to project conversion we’ve captured 600 opportunities.”

-Bonnie Dallum, Global Intelligent Automation CoE Lead quote

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